Posted on by slickdungeon · 2 Comments

Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

Only Roy can save us from this hell – spoilers below

It’s Fiction Friday here again in the dungeon. The light is dim and the walls are musty but the reading is… something to do. In my ponderous shelves I searched for a book and came up with the first in the supremely annoying Agatha Raisin series. It left me wondering just how painful gouging my own eyes out with a spoon actually is. Unfortunately for me, there are no spoons down here.

Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death is essentially what you would expect it to be. It’s a murder mystery in a quiet little English village and our hero Agatha Raisin has to clear her own name by solving the case. Otherwise everyone will assume she is the murderer which we all know she is not. I don’t really have any issue with the premise of the story or even most of the plot.

The thing I cannot stand about this book is Agatha Raisin herself. I absolutely hate this character. People say that Millennials are entitled but that generation has nothing on Agatha when it comes to that department. I am going to walk you through the book and tell you all the ways that Agatha just completely gets under my skin.

To be fair, Agatha Raisin definitely has her share of fans. This is a strangely popular series and there is even a television adaptation of it. I haven’t watched it and I don’t plan to. If you are a big Agatha Raisin fan, that’s fine. You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. The difference is that when guests in my dungeon disagree with me, sometimes they get lost in the mazes for quite some time. But I’m sure you and I will get along fine.

The story starts off in London where Agatha has decided to give up her successful Public Relations firm and go live in a quaint little village in the Cotswolds. At the party for her leaving she is given what I can only describe as an inappropriate gift of undergarments from one of her assistants named, Roy. We’ll talk more about him later but let’s just say he could be the key to everyone’s sanity in this whole series.

Agatha makes her big move and immediately hates it. She is able to afford an interior decorator to spruce up the place before she even shows up. Agatha is also not a big believer in actual truth. We know this because she watches a reporter in Riyadh on television and her first thought is that he should have just reported in front of a fake palm tree in London. Fake news at it’s best. I won’t go into how, you know, a journalist can probably report the news better where it is happening but that just gives you a glimpse into Agatha’s flexible morality.

She also has a bookshelf with cookbooks that she has never opened. She is specifically mentioned as having only read the kind of books you read to impress people. Then like a paragraph later the author mentions that Agatha reads Agatha Christie books. Those are not the kinds of books people read to impress other people. Those are the kinds of books you read because they are good. So, to sum up Agatha Christie good, Agatha Raisin not good. Also, the frequent mention of Agatha Christie novels is supposed to make you think, oh cute, Agatha Raisin, is also named, Agatha, just like that famed mystery writer who actually wrote good books. Ughh.

Throughout the whole book Agatha wants everyone to instantly like her but she never does anything that would let anyone like her. She kind of says hi to neighbors and assumes that they should all be best friends now.

To ease a bit of her growing loneliness she goes back to her old office to say hi to her old staff. When she gets there and sees that the company she sold it to actually did stuff to the office, she gets royally pissed. I mean, she sold it but she still expects the people she sold it to should do what she wants? What is that?

Agatha also bullies every single receptionist, waiter, or low level assistant she comes into contact with, She acts in ways that would get an actual person kicked out of an office or restaurant and in ways that had the book been written now, would have ended up as viral videos where she gets a nickname like Agatha the Annoying. Or worse. Use your own imaginations for that. If you need a suggestion, try rhyming it with Magatha the Mass Mole.

We also get a small glimpse into Agatha’s life when she was younger. To sum it up here, she leaves her alcoholic parents without a word. I partly understand that and if she was treated badly, it can make sense but she didn’t even leave a note or anything. Then she promptly marries an alcoholic man, lives with him for two years then leaves him without a word. This is becoming a pattern and it’s so blatantly obvious that the author put this little nugget in so that five books down the line the long lost husband will pop back up and annoy us all again. Agatha assumes he is dead, so that’s code to us the reader, that he is gonna pop back up at the worst time possible later in the series.

One of the very first things Agatha does in her new neighborhood is to steal the housekeeper out from under her neighbor. Because she could. She doesn’t even put an ad in anywhere. She simply asks her neighbor if she knows of anyone who cleans houses. The neighbor says she only knows of her housekeeper and Agatha goes and steals her. That’s awfully entitled behavior.

Still, Agatha wants to be loved and adored in her community so she sees that there is a quiche competition for homemade quiche. Agatha asks one of her neighbors how to enter. The reasonable reply she gets is that she can read the information on the flyers that are all over town. Does Agatha do that? Heck no. She instead decides to take her neighbors out to dinner to get more information about it. If I was her neighbor I would have been left wondering if Agatha was illiterate or just lazy.

Agatha gets the dirt on the competition, finds out that it’s consistently won by the same person year after year and decides to buy a quiche from a bakery. She has no qualms about cheating, or fairness, or being an honest human being for even the slightest of moments. Again, more entitled behavior here. And not only that but she thinks to herself that her quiche, that she did not bake, and clearly broke rules to enter, had better win.

The next day Agatha eats at a restaurant that has some rich and famous people in it. She thinks of these as her people even though she doesn’t know any rich or famous people. Yet it was stated earlier in the book that Agatha ran a successful PR firm with famous clients. Which is it?

You can probably guess where this is going. Agatha loses the competition and she assumes it is rigged because she didn’t win. Not because the same woman wins every year, because Agatha didn’t win. That night, the judge, Mr. Cummings-Browne, takes a bite of Agatha’s leftover quiche and kicks the bucket.

There’s a whole lot of plot nonsense that goes on but it’s the standard solving a mystery kind of thing you would expect. Instead of go through all that, let me just provide you with some insight into not only Agatha but some of the other characters and events that occur.

The cops in this town strike me as exceptionally dumb. First, they figure out that Cummings-Browne’s death was not from natural causes. Then they decide that it could not have been poisoning because they find out the quiche came from a bakery. Because, you know, packaged food can’t be poisoned once opened or anything. They also find out that the quiche came from Agatha so they promptly ask her to bake them a quiche. Look, I’m not Sherlock Holmes but if I suspect someone could have had anything to do with a poison quiche, I think the last thing on my request list is to ask that person to make me a quiche. And in my final evidence that the police here are not all that bright, one of the cops says that it couldn’t have been the wife because the murder had to have been premeditated. Uh, yeah, hello? That’s how most spousal murders occur (at least in fiction, not sure of the actual crime statistics). Anyway, why would having to think about it first mean someone couldn’t have done it?

Agatha is also seriously judgmental of people based on their looks. Herself included really as she is constantly thinking to herself that she is too fat. But she thinks that Bill Wong, the police officer is too small to be a police officer. She thinks her ex-assistant, Roy is too effeminate. And at random times she wants to slap people for laughing.

A lot of the time in this book is spent describing meals that Agatha eats and is annoyed she has to pay for at restaurants. In fact every single time she buys a meal for anyone other than herself she complains internally about the cost. But it seems to me she has a good amount of money, so that’s just being a cheap skate.

I also want to take a minute to talk about how although this is a crime mystery novel, and Agatha basically solves the mystery, she can somehow still be a terribly naive sleuth. For starters, Agatha wants the death to be a murder because that would be better for her since she could solve it and people would somehow forget about her cheating in the contest. My guess would be people would think, hey, there’s Agatha Rasin, the woman who cheated in the quiche contest, the judge dropped dead and she somehow solved the murder. Awfully convenient for her. It’s demonstrated in the book that Cummings-Browne was having affairs all over the place, yet Agatha and the cops are surprised that a lot of women go to his funeral. Once Agatha figures out who likely committed the murder, she rushes over to the suspected poisoner’s place and promptly drinks tea. How freaking dumb do you have to be to do that? And to only Agatha’s surprise the tea was totally poisoned.

But perhaps the most egregious example of Agatha’s annoying entitled attitude has to do with her ex-assistant Roy. You can tell from Agatha’s internal monologue that she barely thinks of Roy as a real human being at the start of this story and it hardly gets any better from there. She assumes that if she goes back to London and opens a new PR firm, Roy will automatically want to work with her again. When Roy comes to visit her, she complains about everywhere he and his friend want to go. For this charity auction thing she comes up with, she forces Roy to put on a ridiculous costume and pass out flyers. When Roy gets any credit for the auction in the press, Agatha hates it even though she told Roy he could have the credit for it. And she forces the poor guy to ride her bike instead of take her car to do all this. Then she has him help her inflate the bidding, justifying it to herself that it’s all for charity. Charity is great and all but Agatha is only doing this so that her neighbors will like her in the first place, so I don’t think it counts for much.

The conclusion of the book is basically that Agatha solves the case, nearly dies, is rescued by the cops, the cops take credit for solving the case, but we all get the impression we have not heard the last of Agatha solving mysterious deaths.

I propose an alternate ending to this. Let’s just realize at the outset that this little village that was basically at peace before Agatha came along now has a serial killer in it. I mean, she appears in 29 novels and 3 short stories. Assuming a body shows up in each one of those, there is no way Agatha is not the ultimate culprit. Here’s what we’ll do instead. Roy, you know you want to get rid of Agatha. She belittles you, she uses you, she even wants to control your love life. I’m sure you can’t stand her anymore than I can. Roy, I am begging you, invite Agatha over for some tea. She’ll drink it without question. You can slip something in there and we can be rid of her. The cops are too dumb to figure it out because you would have had to think of it ahead of time. You’ll not only get off scot-free, you’ll be preventing 31 future murders. Help us, Roy, help save us from this hell!

That’s all for this week but next week, I am going to take a look at A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo and see if this is a quality piece of science fiction, or a bunch of swill just waiting to be made into a bad made for television film. Until then, stay silent and in the shadows as you exit Slick’s Dungeon of Dusty Tomes.

Posted on by slickdungeon · 3 Comments

The Toxic Avenger

Melvin Ferd for President? Spoilers follow

There are many strange creatures lurking around down here in my dungeon. Some are harmless and just make noises, others are nefarious and threaten the safety of my guests. As you make your way through be sure to watch your step for any hidden springs or traps. But even if you spring one, you are not going to find anything as weird and unique as The Toxic Avenger.

Released in 1984 this film was a blend of a superhero origin story, a body horror film, and a romantic comedy, with some political commentary thrown in. If you are thinking to yourself that is too much for one film to contain, you are absolutely right. This movie tries to do so many things and it’s so weird that it easily achieved cult status for directors and producers, Michael Herz, and Lloyd Kaufman. This would probably best be described as a low budget B film but it really sits more around a Z film.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it. From the opening we are warned that this film contains graphic violence. It absolutely delivers on that promise. I’ll site some specific examples as we go along but if you want to say one thing positive about the film makers here, it’s that they do not lie to you.

Let me give you a brief rundown of the film and along the way I will show you how this is actually a progressive film that would be right at home with the platform of any 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate.

In the opening shots and voice over we are shown New York City and told that pollution is a necessary byproduct of today’s modern society. To emphasize the point we get a close up of a filthy field with barrels of chemicals lying near the water. It’s not that far off of a description of how New York City actually was at that time.

Next we see the small, nearby town of Tromaville, the toxic chemical capital of the world. Not only do we hear that in voice over, it’s right on the sign for the town. Right off we know that toxic chemicals are about to change someone’s life forever. How do we know that? We are told in voice over.

If you are getting the impression that the film makers do not trust their audience to figure things out, that’s because they do not. The story centers around a scrawny janitor named, Melvin Ferd. He mops at the local health center and is a ninety-pound weakling similar to, Peter Parker, prior to his radioactive spider bite.

He even gets bullied by the two town bullies. Because the film makers want to make sure you know that they are villains, these bullies are named, Bozo, and Slug. The reaction these guys have to even seeing, Melvin, is to literally scream. It’s hilarious because it’s so over the top.

In order to establish that Slug, Bozo, and their girlfriends, Julie, and Wanda are seriously evil, we first hear them talk about doing hit and run driving. Then we see them late at night in their car, cans of beer and bottles of alcohol lying everywhere as, Julie, goes over the rules of the hit and run game. There’s some racist stuff thrown in that I’m not a fan of but establishes even more what horrible people these are. Julie, reminds, Bozo, that if you hit a kid with the car, it’s double points. Looking at the darkness of the scene you would have to guess it’s around midnight at this point. In one of the parts that I find weirdest and funniest, a mom tells her son, Skippy, to put on his helmet as he gets on his bike. Who lets a kid go riding at midnight? Anyway, Bozo, sees the kid and seconds later he is flattened, head squished like a Halloween pumpkin. Graphic violence delivered.

After this, one of the few jokes that hits it’s mark in this movie is made. Bozo, wants to go do it again, find a new victim. Slug, says he can’t because he has to get up early. When the other three ask him why he replies that he has to go to church. To which they all nod as if this is a perfectly reasonable excuse. For some reason it cracks me up every time.

The next day we go back to, Melvin. Julie, comes up with a plan to trick, Melvin, into an embarrassing situation. She basically convinces him that she wants to make out with him by the pool. But only after he puts on a ballerina outfit with green polka dots and a pink tutu. No one ever said, Melvin, was smart. Melvin, enters the pool area in the dark (why he couldn’t find the light switch since he works there is beyond me) and finds what he thinks is, Julie. The lights come up and we see he is fondling a sheep. Not only that, the sheep is wearing lipstick and the pool is entirely crowded with people. Not a chance, Melvin, would have avoided colliding with some of them getting over to, Julie.

In embarrassment, Melvin, jumps out of the window and lands in a barrel of toxic waste. it was conveniently placed there because the drivers of the toxic waste truck decided to stop and do some drugs. So, Melvin, landing in the waste, gets out, is covered in green sizzling goo and is screaming bloody murder. Bozo, assumes he’s faking it. No one ever said, Bozo, was smart either. A police officer tries to help but his hands burst into flames upon touching the waste. Melvin, himself catches fire but it’s so obvious that the stunt double is nowhere near Melvin’s size that it’s comical.

We get to see, Melvin, transform, again much like, Peter Parker, but, Melvin, becomes grotesque as well as muscular. He still has his mop and tutu though. For reference see the picture at the top of this post.

Melvin, basically goes into hiding in a junk yard. We get to see that there is one honest cop in Tromaville and he comes across a gang of thugs including one named, Cigar Face. These thugs beat the cop up and in case you didn’t get it, Cigar Face, takes his cigar and burns the cop’s face saying, “Now you’ll see why they call me, Cigar Face!”. Subtext does not exist in Tromaville. But before much real harm can come to the officer, Melvin, shows up and rips them apart. And I mean literally. More graphic violence delivered. Cigar Face does get away though. Toxie, (the affectionate name given to the monster) leaves mops in their faces. I don’t know where he got the mops either.

Melvin, apologizes to the cop for getting so out of control. The town however, welcomes the monster as a hero. Despite the fact that everyone saw, Melvin, land in the toxic waste, no one seems to connect the two.

The only people who seem upset about this monster are those working in the Mayor’s office. Political corruption at it’s most obvious and finest. See these bad guys are on the payroll for the Mayor and are giving him a cut of their ill gotten gains. What do they do to get this money? No idea and it’s not explained in the movie.

Next we see, Toxie, making a home for himself more or less and this scene goes on for way too long. He spruces up the junkyard as best he can., including hanging a picture of his mother that he didn’t have in the previous shot. While this is going on, the Mayor is engaged in a land development scheme that is going to put toxic waste even closer to the water, endangering the population further.

Now to really establish that bad guys are bad and that, Melvin, aka, Toxie, is good, we see him disrupt a robbery and assault at a taco restaurant. The robbers are comically dressed and even introduce themselves to the crowd. They kill one of the innocent customers and within moments, Melvin, shows up. Here is also where the romance part of the film comes in. The robbers threaten a blind woman and kill her service dog. Needless to say, Toxie, is not okay with this behavior. He seriously destroys them, putting one into the hot oil machine, one into the oven, and making a literal milkshake out of a third. At one point he even pulls an arm off wookie style.

The blind woman, Sara, is eternally grateful and since she can’t see is not afraid of the monster. The film makers are still not sure if you think, Melvin, is the good guy so they have a scientist come on and proclaim that the monster must have a drive to destroy evil people since the only people the monster has destroyed are evil. Also, just in case you didn’t get it, the scientist explains that the monster was exposed to toxic chemicals. Still no one in town seems to think this is, Melvin. Also, the scientist tells us that the monster has a basic instinct to seek out and destroy evil. This basically gives the film free licence to show a lot more graphic violence later in the film.

Sara, and, Melvin, continue to fall in love. Some really horrible blind jokes are made but in all it’s kind of weirdly sweet.

Melvin, returns to familiar territory and goes back to the health club to seek out and destroy evil. A dude’s head is smashed with a weight machine, mop shoved on top afterwards, Wanda, is roasted over hot coals and another set of street thugs is ripped apart. Even more graphic violence delivered.

Bozo, and, Slug, attempt another hit and run but are foiled because, Toxie, moves the kids out of the way. Why they were sitting in the middle of the street is beyond me. This kicks off a montage of the monster helping people around town. The public is solidly on his side.

The mayor gloats about how the monster hasn’t gotten them yet, setting us up for the final conflict. Meanwhile a few of the thugs who had gotten away (including, Cigar Face) try to kill, Melvin, but he jumps out of the way and they all kill each other in ridiculously stupid fashion. We get more scenes of, Melvin, and, Sara, falling for each other.

Julie, is still alive so, Melvin, goes to the health club to kill her. He succeeds but, Slug, and, Bozo, are still alive and ready to hit and run again. Since, Julie, is not around to bring the car around, they decide to steal a car from an old lady. In a ridiculously crazy scene, they beat the old lady and take the car. I think they put this scene in because maybe for a minute the audience might have forgotten that these are bad guys.

In sweet revenge, Melvin, kills, Slug, and tells, Bozo, that he is, Melvin, as he causes their car to crash. Bozo, dies and, Toxie, survives.

Next, Melvin, kills a seemingly innocent woman at a dry cleaners. The Mayor figures he has the monster now and can call in the National Guard. Melvin, tries to hide away with, Sara, because he thinks he has gone too far. But it turns out the little old lady was head of a slavery ring, so he’s still only killing evil people.

A search ensues but the cop who was saved by the monster is opposed to killing the monster. He and a group of other civilians agree that they have to help the monster. In the climax of the film, the cops find the monster, with help from the National Guard. The whole town (or at least as many extras as they could get for the scene) show up also. Tromaville is still on the side of the monster. Only the little guy can save, Melvin, now.

With rifles and tanks aimed at, Melvin’s, tent, the crowd steps up. They proudly proclaim that the soldiers will have to shoot them if they want to shoot the monster. For some reason, at this point, the town seems to know that the monster is, Melvin. (Well at least his mother does) The soldiers and police officers refuse to comply with destroying, Toxie.

The Mayor is still bent on destroying the monster and shoots at him several times to no effect. Toxie, literally rips his guts out in maybe the least realistic looking graphic violence of the whole film.

The crowd goes wild and we go into an eighties pop song celebration crowd scene. We can’t end the movie without another voice over though, so we are told that the next time you are in danger, maybe, just maybe, the Toxic Avenger will be there.

So, why do I think this movie is progressive at it’s core? They want to clean up the environment. The Toxic Avenger shows what the harmful results of pollution can be. They want to clean up corruption in politics. Sure, they use over the top graphic violence to do it, but isn’t cleaning up corruption half of what the candidates are saying now? Melvin, treats his blind girlfriend with compassion, courtesy and respect, so this movie respects the rights of the disabled. (Ok so maybe the blind jokes don’t but still). There are even openly gay characters in this film. They are entirely played for laughs but in 1985, when there was basically zero representation, at least it was something. And obviously since, Toxie, doesn’t try to kill them, being gay wasn’t considered evil by this film, which could be taken as a progressive stance at the time. Melvin, even believes in following the rules of the road as he ensures safe driving by getting rid of the town bullies.

So, if you are thinking that the Democratic Presidential field is a little overcrowded, and not another candidate could make it on the ticket, well, you have not yet considered, Melvin Ferd, a.k.a., The Toxic Avenger

I hope you enjoyed this review. I am absolutely not making the claim that this is a good film. In fact it’s downright bad, but it’s so weird that if you can handle it, it’s absolutely worth a watch.

A few more notes about this film. Not only did it spawn sequels, but there is a musical about it and it inspired a kid’s Saturday morning cartoon show. Also, I just found out that a reboot is being planned. I will say this though, if they try to use CGI for the gore, if they try to make the plot more coherent, and if the acting is any good at all, then a reboot will not work at all. Trust me, it’s the bad parts of this movie that make it good.

Come back next week when I will find out why Surf Nazis Must Die.

Posted on by slickdungeon

Things Good Girls Don’t Do by Codi Gary.

This book does not contain a good girl – Spoilers ahead

Welcome back to my dungeon where the floors are always slippery, the lights are always dim and the shelves are full of dust. This week I plucked off of my shelf a particularly bad romance by the name of Things Good Girls Don’t Do. Our esteemed author is none other than Codi Gary who seems to have a slew of these types of books, all based on the premise that a good, sweet, innocent girl goes for a “bad” boy. While I can’t speak about the others in this series, I can tell you for a fact that the bad boy in this book was never at all bad and is truly pretty boring and the girl in it is at best polite, but in no way good.

Let me start by summarizing the premise so we all know where we are starting here. Good girl Katie Connors has been dumped by her jerk-face boyfriend of seven years. We know he is a jerk-face because 1. he cheated on her, 2. he then invites Katie to his wedding with the girl he cheated on her with and 3. and most importantly, Jimmy is short and stocky. This point is repeatedly made in this book, that Jimmy is short and stocky. So for those of you who are not sure, short and stocky equals a jerk-face. This is one of those things that just makes me crazy with romance books. The body image problems here are nuts. What’s wrong with being short and stocky? Do all the short and stocky guys depicted in romance books have to be jerk-faces? Name one romance book where the short and stocky guy is the main love interest. Anyway, I got off on a tangent there.

So Katie’s heart is broken still seven months later when she is getting ready for this festival that they are going to have in the small town of Rock Canyon, Idaho. Katie speaks with the guy who we know she will fall in love with, local “bad boy” (I use quotes here because he is anything but bad, more like a moron) Chase Trepasso. We know he’s the one for Katie because 1. he is not short nor stocky, 2. he gets a cool name like Chase instead of a basic name like Jimmy, and 3. most importantly, he has steel-grey eyes. That point is repeated over and over in this book. Take a moment and think about how many people you know. Now think about how many of them have steel-grey eyes. My guess is you know one at maximum. If I saw someone with steel-grey eyes, I would think they had come from a cosplay contest and had just forgotten to take the contacts out.

Before I get further into the summary of the plot, let me take a moment to tell you why Chase is the bad boy and Katie is the good girl. Um… Chase runs a tattoo parlor. Ok, maybe not that conventional, but he owns the place and makes a good business so uh, where’s the bad boy part? Katie is the good girl because she dresses conservatively, enters and wins beauty queen contests and doesn’t really swear in public. I gotta say, in small town Idaho, that doesn’t make you much different than most women. We’ll get back to this whole good bad thing in a bit but there’s the basis for it.

So Katie, feeling rather mopey one day, goes to the local bar. This book being full of really bad puns, it’s called Buck’s Shot Bar. Yeah, I groaned too and I am known for making bad puns. Katie drinks too many mojitos and gets a bit tipsy. She writes down stuff she’s never done, like dye her hair with purple streaks, shoplift, and have a one night stand. So of course, fake bad boy and super hot hunk of meat Chase Trepasso does the thing that makes third graders bad and steals a girl’s note. Yeah, he takes it from her and I guess that means he’s a rebel and not, you know, a jerk-face. Let’s remember that Chase is not short nor stocky, so it’s fine.

Chase, being the rebel he is reads the note and sees all these mildly rebellious things written on it and realizes he should give the note back. So he pretty much harasses Katie into letting him “help her” to complete them, one night stand included. Cause that’s not creepy or weird at all.

I imagine you can guess how this goes, Katie does a few wild things, Chase is there, they hook up, so on and so on, pretty standard stuff. We learn over and over how bad Chase is and how good Katie is. Only Katie’s not good anymore because she speaks her mind when she wants to now. It’s a little weird how it took her being with a guy to be able to do that but ok sure. Chase is bad because he helps Katie to uh… go skinny dipping, gives her a tattoo and kind of generally hangs out with her. So, giving Katie a ride on his motorcycle is supposed to up his street cred I guess, but the author pointedly doesn’t mention any helmets being placed on Katie’s head until like the third time she rides, so to me Chase is not bad, just a moron who’s okay with a girl he likes potentially getting her brains splattered on the pavement. Also, while he gives Katie this tattoo, to dull the pain, he hands her a flask of scotch. Now, I’m no health code or ethical expert, but I’m thinking that there are some regulations about intoxicating your clients while performing your tattoo duties. This seems especially stupid to me considering how Katie had already proven herself to be a lightweight drinker more than once in the book.

Chase gets to know Katie and they start to develop mutual feelings for each other. There’s this whole side plot with the festival going on where Katie has to ride on a float and pass her beauty queen crown on to the next winner. So in the course of this side plot, we find out that Katie is 30 and the girls competing in the contest are like 15-25 usually but Katie did the contest last year cause jerk-faced short man Jimmy wanted her to. So she does it and wins. And she keeps thinking to herself how she doesn’t look like those fifteen year old girls anymore. What?? Yeah, so first of all, I got the impression from the book that Katie had the emotional maturity of a seventeen year old at best but I was pegging her at around twenty-three. I’ve got news for anyone who is thirty, male or female, comparing yourself to a fifteen year old is not a good comparison. Why would you do that? I sure as heck hope you don’t still look like you are fifteen when you are thirty cause if you do, there’s a problem.

To find out more about how bad of a guy Chase is, we find out that he draws graphic novels and is known for one he called Destructo-boy. I think our author pulled out of a hat what they thought a comic book title should sound like and went with it. We also find out that Chase is college educated and went to Berkeley on a scholarship. Katie’s reaction to that news was amazement. She was amazed that he got a scholarship, not that he went to Berkeley. I mean, not everyone gets a scholarship but Katie was like “That’s really hard to get” as if he was a Rhodes Scholar. The dude drew some graphic novels and won a scholarship. All due respect to graphic novels (I particularly love them) but doing art and then getting a scholarship to do art happens to people and it’s not that big of a thing. The final bit of evidence that Chase is a bad guy is that he has tattoos and piercings. His piercings are vaguely described and the one and only tattoo on Chase that is described is that of a sun. Why do we find out he had a tattoo of a sun on his chest? So that we can find out he has mommy issues and the sun on his chest reminds him of his mother singing “You are my sunshine” to him. Oh, the rebel. Keep that guy off the streets or he’ll sing nursery rhymes at you.

Ok, so furthering the plot along, Chase falls deeper for Katie but can’t, you know, man up and say it out loud. At this festival thing, there are these fireworks and jerk-face Jimmy shows up with his buddies and starts harassing Katie. Chase and his friends get into it and a fight ensues. During the whole fight, Chase is freaking out internally because Katie called him her boyfriend. Long story short, Chase gets his butt kicked pretty hard in what amounts to an unfair fight, then the newly liberated Katie decides on some property damage and busts Jimmy’s headlights.

After the fight Katie is like, you need to go to the hospital, Chase and he’s like, I’ll be fine. This dude who probably has cracked or broken ribs gets on his motorcycle (or maybe he was driving his truck at this point, can’t quite remember) but drives home. On the way, his stepfather calls him and tells him his mother is in the hospital potentially dying of liver failure. So Chase does what any reasonable bad boy would do and goes to try and donate his liver and save his mother. He writes Katie a note saying they will talk when he gets back and he had a family emergency. So this is important here, I want you to remember how Katie sees Chase last in these moments. He’s injured to the point where she thinks he needs a hospital, then she finds a note saying he had this family emergency and they will talk in a couple days after the weekend when he gets back. You have to remember this because this is how we can see that Katie is a truly awful, horrible person and not good in any way.

Chase gets to know his mom a little bit before she dies. They had a strained relationship earlier. He’s not a good match for her on the liver donation so he stays a while longer than expected. He gets surprised by the fact that his mother cared about him more than he thought. I just tell you this so you know what Chase is up to while Katie does her thing.

Katie mopes around for like a week because she thinks Chase just up and abandoned her. She doesn’t call, doesn’t text, doesn’t do anything to find out where he went or what his family emergency was. She is mad because he doesn’t call or text her. She doesn’t seem to think, hey, the guy who drove away with potentially broken ribs might be hurt or have been in accident and maybe I should file a missing person report. Nope, never occurs to her. Her friends convince her that the best thing for her to do is to have an un-bachelorette party. Basically they go to bars pretending that Katie is getting married so they can get guys to buy them free drinks. Katie doesn’t do anything worse than talk to guys but I think it’s a bad look when your boyfriend seems to have gone missing with very little explanation. But maybe I’m just old fashioned that way. One thing I have to point out is the conversation that Katie has with some of these guys in one of these bars. She comments on how muscular they all are. They tell her that they are part of the Boise Grizzlies football team. So Katie thinks to herself how she doesn’t follow professional football. Her not following football seems perfectly reasonable to me. But the athletes specifically say they are football players, so they should know what sport they play. Apparently they don’t though, and neither does the author because A. there is no professional Idaho football team and B. here is a picture taken from the website of the actual Boise Grizzlies.

Pretty sure those are not football players. Do fifteen seconds of internet research!

Finally Chase is done wrapping things up with his mom and stepdad, funeral is over etc and he goes back to Rock Canyon, Idaho. At this point Katie is EXPECTING AN APOLOGY. Sorry for the caps there but duuuuuuuuude. She expects an apology? She didn’t text or checkup on the guy in any way, was out partying and he was, you know, at his mother’s funeral. I’m no fan of non-stocky, sunshine tattooed, steel-grey eyed Chase, but even I felt bad for him at this point. But instead of Chase ditching this crazy woman, he asks how he can make it up to her. HIS mom died. Not hers but he has to apologize? Ughh, romance books. Anyway, he makes a list of his own, basically a list of nice things he has never done for a woman. He buys her flowers, feeds her chocolate covered strawberries, you get the idea. Katie, though, being. you know, a horrible person, isn’t swayed so easily. She really wants him back but can’t admit that so she asks her friends what to do. They come up with the idiotic plan of having an actual bachelorette party for a woman that Chase knows that is getting married for real. Nothing wrong with having a party like that but Katie gives Chase the distinct impression that she is going with another guy (why a guy is at a bachelorette party I don’t know) to make him jealous.

Chase rushes over there in a mad rage and finds Katie dancing on top of the bar. Now, in a sane world, this guy would be like, this woman didn’t care where I was for days on end, didn’t check up on me even though I was injured, ignored all my romantic advances and decided to go out partying without me. I am out of here. Noooooope. Chase confesses he will love her and never wants to leave her. We jump to an epilogue where they have been married long enough to have had a kid but of course they’re still hot for each other and not, you know, exhausted parents of an infant. It’s freaking ridiculous.

So that’s the book. I don’t recommend reading it unless you are stuck in one of these dungeon rooms like I am. But before I sign off on this post, let me provide you with a few more items from this book that annoyed or confused me.

  1. The name of the coffee shop is “The Local Bean”
  2. The name of the clothing store/adult toy store is “Sweet Tarts”
  3. Chase makes Katie a mix CD with both AC/DC (good call) and The Back Street Boys (not a good call) on it. What? This is the bad boy in town?? Um ok sure.
  4. Katie is depicted as being good because one time she helps an old lady cross a street. I call that common decency but whatevs.
  5. Katie is constantly popping her mouth off as the new Katie but every time she does, it just reads to me like she is being a jerk-face herself although admittedly some of the people she is talking to had it coming.
  6. Here is a sampling of the romantic dialogue that comes out of Chase’s mouth: “I’d kiss you if you ate dog s**t and barfed fish guts.”
  7. Here is sampling of the romantic dialogue that comes out of Katie’s mouth: “I think your kisses are like crack.”
  8. More from Chase: “Now that is a sexy noise. You sound like a hyena/pig hybrid.”
  9. Chase is such a bad boy that he hires the High School Glee Club to sing to Katie. James Dean watch out.
  10. Katie’s response to Chase saying he loves her is, “Hey baby, do you wanna do this thing?” This is supposed to be a sweet throwback to an earlier conversation they had but if I was Chase, I would have dropped Katie right then and there and been like, you are never going to grow up and good luck finding a guy.

I’ll leave you with this thought. Next time you see a steel-grey eyed man walk into your small Idaho town, stop pretending he is bad and you are good and just save us all an awful read ok?

If you liked this post, come back for more next week when I am going to go through one of the cozy mysteries by M.C. Beaton in the Agatha Raisin series. I’ll be reading Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. I’m afraid I will die from the sheer annoyance of it. Or, you know, from the strange creatures lurking behind these walls, but that might be less painful. For now, I have been Slick, this has been my dungeon and reading has not been my pleasure.

Posted on by slickdungeon · 1 Comment

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

Tomatoes are not funny even a little bit – Spoilers ahead but are you really going to watch this?

Sometimes late at night, when there is no one here and the only sounds in the dungeon are the rats crawling in the walls, the mild breeze of wind blowing through the cracks and the soft moaning of some unfortunate soul lost to the mazes, I like to pull down a silk screen, fire up my ancient projection machine and watch films. Any films. Good films, bad films, and terrible films.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes falls solidly in the last category. From the opening seconds of the opening frame you know you are in for a terrible ride. The movie starts with a title card mentioning The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. I think the point was to say that if The Birds is not ridiculous then maybe this movie, intended to make fun of movies like The Birds is not ridiculous. They are so wrong about this.

Before I get on with the plot and summary of this film there are six things I want to point out.

  1. There is one scene where the reporter is talking and her glasses fall off of her head, she makes no move to recover them or do anything but just keep reciting her lines so you know they only had money enough for one take.
  2. Trying to be Monty Python clever, they keep randomly running fake ads in the middle of the movie scrolling on the bottom. It never even kind of works.
  3. This is the kind of movie you only get out of the seventies and only with a huge excess of drugs and lack of money.
  4. This kind of wants to be Airplane and really, really is not. To be fair Airplane had not been released yet so maybe they just didn’t know what comedy should look like.
  5. There is one good gag that almost works where there is a tiny room with a huge table and all the generals have to crawl over the table to sit down. I want to see that gag again in a good film sometime.
  6. With this film being a cult classic and it having music in it, there is one thing I am never going to understand about it. Why don’t we have a Broadway musical for this??? If we can have a musical for Little Shop of Horrors, Hairspray and Legally Blonde, this can be a hit musical.

We open on an innocent and unnamed housewife who is mauled to death by a tomato that seems to come directly out of her kitchen sink. Next we see a set of investigators examining the body to dramatically proclaim that it is not blood they are seeing but tomato juice.

Ok look, this movie is supposed to be a comedy and they tried the best they could with absolutely no budget but this movie fails so spectacularly on so many levels I can’t quite capture it in words. The plot is pretty much non-existent. The acting is so bad it’s hilarious. The leisure suits of the era add an indescribably weird look to the whole thing. This all adds up to being so bad that it’s kind of good.

This movie has a whopping 27% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes (perfect pairing there) which is much higher than I thought it would have and astronomically higher than it deserves.

The absolute best part of the movie actually comes close to the beginning. It’s the song that goes with the movie. I can’t possibly think of this movie without singing this song in my head so I am putting the lyrics below for you to enjoy. You have to imagine this being sung in a deep and loud voice, sort of operatic style.

Attack of the killer tomatoes!
Attack of the killer tomatoes!
They’ll beat you, bash you, squish you, mash you
Chew you up for brunch and finish you off for dinner or lunch!
They’re marching down the halls
They’re crawling up the walls
They’re gooey, gushy, squishy, mushy
Rotten to the core
They’re standing outside your door!

Remember Herman Farbage
while taking out his garbage
He turned around and he did see tomatoes hiding in his tree
Now he’s just a memory!

I know I’m going to miss her
a tomato ate my sister
Sacramento fell today
They’re marching in San Jose
Tomatoes are on their way!

Classic lullaby stuff right there. I can attempt to summarize the movie but it’s completely disjointed and weird so doing so definitely loses something in the translation. There’s some kind of experiment maybe that happened that made tomatoes grow big and vicious. They show up in the ocean Jaws style at one point and kill some teenagers. There’s a government agency with a single car that is out to stop the carnage caused by these tomatoes.

This government agency has a few experts to help them. There is a swimming expert, who is a woman wearing an Olympic track suit, an underwater expert (different from the woman) who is wearing scuba gear, a disguise expert wearing a fake rubber nose and glasses, and some kind of soldier who spends the entire movie dragging a parachute around behind him.

There’s also a reporter who is on the case to, um, I guess, be there. There’s an ad guy who meets with the President’s Press Secretary over and over, making points like with larger tomatoes comes bigger pizzas.

We also get to see tons of weird shots of civilians running around town and making side commentary. So for the plot logistics here, it’s kind of hard to quite get down but the Press Secretary wants the tomatoes to win because he has his own garden and can control the tomatoes, for unexplained reasons. The guy who runs the agency is trying to stop whoever is helping the tomatoes.

Washington at first ignores the problem and then quickly panics and sends out the army to stop the tomatoes. To establish where we are geographically, the film makers take a shot of a trolley running up the streets of San Francisco and label it New York City. I think this is supposed to be a gag but it totally does not work on any level.

The swimming expert is dropped off in the forest, the underwater expert left on the side of a highway, the disguise expert is told to infiltrate the tomatoes and the parachute guy goes with the head of the federal agency to some random hotel. The reporter is there and seems to know who they are because, reasons?

Along the way there are a few jokes that so don’t hold up they are basically offensive. There’s a homophobic joke that I am not going to repeat and several racist jokes early on, disparaging people from China and Japan which, again, I am not going to repeat. But maybe the worst thing in the movie is the female reporter’s boss telling her that she has not lived up to her full potential, quite obviously meaning she should sleep with someone. I know this is supposed to be a joke but I don’t think this worked as a joke even in the less enlightened more drug fueled days of the seventies.

The best joke in the whole movie comes sort of randomly before the big tomato attack. A guy who is wearing a lab coat and stethoscope and is just described as a scientist is examining one of these overly large tomatoes. In seriously dramatic fashion, the camera pans in on the actor, nice and tight so we can hear him say, “Gentlemen, the situation is worse than we feared, This is a cherry tomato.” It’s pretty much the only joke in the whole movie that really works.

So there is a showdown between man and vegetable (yes I know a tomato is a fruit but they keep saying these are vegetables in the movie). A couple things I have neglected to mention before I describe the big battle. First, there is a song that keeps coming on the radio and whenever that song is on, the tomatoes stop moving. The song is called “Puberty Love.” I am not making that up.

Also, this is actually a musical. People at completely random times break into song for no apparent reason and almost totally independent of the story. It’s so weird, and not in a good way.

The swimming expert is killed by tomatoes. The underwater expert finds a local water fountain and we never see him again. The disguise expert blows his cover by asking the tomatoes for ketchup. The agency guy and the parachute guy uncover the Press Secretary’s plan and figure out that the only thing that can stop the tomatoes is “Puberty Love.”

Before this information is conveyed, the tomatoes make waste of the army, and invade the country with only the west coast left standing. To show the different cities being consumed by panic we see a group of the same people running in front of a brick wall while the radio says people are panicking in New York (crowd runs across the wall), Boston (crowd runs the other way across the wall), Seattle (crowd runs the other way across the wall) and this goes on for far too long for the gag to be funny.

Just when all seems to be completely lost the government agency guy gets everyone to play “Puberty Love” on their radios and shrinks the tomatoes. That is until the final dramatic moment when the agency guy and the reporter are cornered. Thank God, agency guy has the sheet music for “Puberty Love” because they are faced with the biggest, fattest tomato of them all. And it has leaves over where you might expect a tomato to have ears. The paper defeats the tomato.

So I guess it’s rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper covers rock and kills tomatoes.

If my description here made any kind of sense, I did this movie a disservice as it really is incoherent.

My feeding bowl is running low and I’m hoping that more popcorn will be slid under the door before next week. I’ll be viewing one of the classics of Troma productions, it’s first breakout hit, The Toxic Avenger.

Until next time, stay out of dark and dreary dungeons, but if you have to be stuck in one, wear a top hat and carry a cane so that you can be as slick as me.

Posted on by slickdungeon · 3 Comments

Welcome to my Dungeon

What is this blog and who the heck are you?

Hello, my name is Slick, and I see you have made your way through the muck and mire to land at my door. You must be a true seeker of garbage and filth. I like your style. I have a whole treasure trove of awful books and terrible films to share with you. You can see by my top hat and cane that I am of elite status. I have more time than I know what to do with.

Perhaps I have been locked below for too long but I’ve decided to read and watch the worst of the worst and give these materials my critical review. Each week I will be reviewing one bad book and one awful film.

But before we get started I need to address the elephant in the room. The elephant’s address is Slick Dungeon’s Dungeon, first room, underground, the internet.

Now we need to talk about the thing that everyone is thinking but no one wants to mention. Why do I, dapper as I am, get to be the judge of what is bad? That’s an excellent question. I’ll say this, there is not one right answer to what is bad. There are bad books and films that are so bad they are good. There are bad books and films that are so bad they are bad. There are even bad books and films that are so bad that you go, meh, it was bad. But who decides it’s bad? Well, it’s a matter of opinion. One man’s trash is another man’s garbage. Or treasure, depending on who you ask. 

I realize it takes an enormous amount of courage to write a book, create a film, dedicate yourself to art and hope to come out the other end with something beautiful, profound or just plain entertaining. I think it takes a whole different kind of courage to write something, or film something, have a whole team of people look at it, edit it, decide to publish it, often knowing it is bad and still deciding to do it. That my friends is true bravery. Also once it is out in the public domain it’s fair game for criticism and analysis.

So we come to the point. I’m no literary genius but I do own a dungeon. So I get to say if it belongs down here in the dung heaps and dust piles or if we should polish something off and elevate it to shiny trophy status. My intention is to do justice to the authors and creators. If their work is bad, I’ll be saying so. With films, I can pretty well guess if it is bad and I am unlikely to be surprised. With books I have had occasions where I thought it would be bad, have read it and been surprised enough to say that the book is able to reach the vaunted status of ok-ish. If that happens, I will let you know. My reviews are intended to be humorous and entertaining and you are welcome to disagree with my opinions and conclusions. Let’s just keep it civil so that the creatures laying in wait behind these decaying walls don’t need to eat any visitors.

For my first reviews I will be doing Things Good Girls Don’t Do by Codi Gary and the film classic Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Let’s hope I can survive.