Author Archives: Bob Evans

Streaming Media Roundup

All I am going to say on the Jimmy situation is that I am not shocked by the hypocrisy shown by the right, only at the speed at which it has been implemented. Now, on to less weighty matters.

Here’s a quick overview of my opinion on streaming media lately.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 3 was not as hard-hitting and not as good as season 2. With only 10 episodes per season, they need to be more selective about which ideas are implemented. I am staying with the series, but this was a little disappointing.

Foundation: Season 3 brought us the end of the Genetic Dynasty, and we have lost one of my favorite characters from the series. The Empire in its form for the last few thousand years has fallen, and the surprises about the Mule were revealed. I never read the books—Asimov’s fiction I found far too dry—but I am really enjoying the series.

1670: Our favorite 17th-century backwater Polish sitcom has returned to Netflix with the fantastically stupid and scheming local lord still making a fool of himself. We kicked off season 2 with a trip to foreign lands and likely a war with the Turks.

Reindeer Mafia: After much waiting and searching to find the series, thanks to a friend tipping us off that the streaming service MHz was having a sale, my sweetie-wife and I are finally watching this Nordic Noir series. Set in Lapland, Finland, the show follows a minor criminal family, their allies and enemies, as a scramble for land and power is ignited by the matriarch’s death, bringing long-buried secrets to the surface.

Slow Horses: Season 4 of the fantastic spy series starts next week, and I am quivering with anticipation. This show lands in the sweet spot between Fleming’s fantasies and le Carré’s cold cynicism.

Forward Momentum Returns

Monday, I got the call from my local Apple store that the repairs on Colossus (my MacBook Air) had been completed, and the laptop was ready to be picked up.

For pretty much all of September I have been unable to work on my novel during my lunch hour as the ‘E’ key on the keyboard had been behaving rather badly, enough to totally disrupt any writing. English has the nasty aspect that ‘E’ is the most commonly employed letter making it, in the case, the most commonly irritating. With every sentence possessing words either without ‘E’s or having far too many of them, I found it impossible to achieve the state of mind that let the creation of the world just flow from my brain to the document.

So, after getting the call in the morning I spent my lunch hour driving from work to the Fashion Valley Apple store. Luckily, I live and work in Mission Valley so all this transpired within a few miles, and I retrieved my laptop. However, with the lunch hour nearly exhausted I got no work done that day.

Yesterday proved to be a better day. Nearly 800 words completed during my lunch and the flow state, despite my apprehension that the interruption has killed connection with the story, had returned.

Perhaps this forced break in the writing of a novel without an outline as my roadmap has turned out to be a blessing from the muses. In the interim a few elements have fallen into place as my brain continued imagining and working the story. Some of the character’s backstory is now much clearer in my mind, the solution to a thorny problem, how will the character discover a hidden cache of vital importance in his place business is now in sight, and the central question of the story has appeared before me.

It has become, once you set aside all the horror, the ghosts, the evil cult of wealthy people, a story about two men, both gay, both in their early thirties but for whom life has been very different. One raised in an accepting environment and exposed to a wide library of arts who was never made to be ashamed of who and what he was. The other man subjected to emotional abuse and isolation from his homophobic family pushing him into a life of desperately seeking acceptance but unable to give it to himself, spiraling into a life of meaningless encounters and substance abuse. The supernatural events of the story challenge both men to ask who they really are.

Assassination’s Ambiguity

First off, and let me state this clearly for those in the back, The Murder of Charlie Kirk was NOT justified and was a crime against Kirk, his kin, and our nation.

The events in Utah last week have spurred my pondering and thinking about assassination. There are certainly persons whom nearly everyone might agree would have improved the world by being subjected to a successful assassination, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and many others. Such a conclusion though comes from the precise knowledge of history. We know of the deaths of millions because that is in our past, but such is not the case for any assassin of these people save the fanciful time traveler.

A man successfully killing Hitler in 1930 does not know of the mass murder to come. Oh, the clues are certainly there, the hate that spews from the party and its leader is vile, intense, and unending but thinking that such hatred might lead to mass murder and knowing it will are two very different things. If Hitler dies in 1930, he’s quickly forgotten just another of dozens of politicians murdered in Germany’s turbulent post-Great War period. It’s also important to remember that Hitler worked within the system. Even as he and his party stated clearly a hatred for democracy, they pledged to destroy it from within, by using the system itself to gain the power to annihilate liberal democracy. The perspective from 1930 would be one where a divisive rabble-rousing politician with noxious views is murdered by his enemy. The people of that parallel reality could never know what the act of assassinating Hitler changed for them and the world.

Conversely, there are assassinations in our history that we mourn and decry as terrible events, Lincoln, Kennedy, King, and others but we cannot know the shape of the world if these leaders had lived. Any projection of that parallel world is more likely than not to be heavily influenced by the political biases of whoever is making the projection. Lincoln’s reconstruction might have avoided Jim Crow and the horrors it created, or he might have continued to amass power in the office of the president fundamentally changing the nature of our system of government and becoming an American dictator.

We can’t know.

Only with historical hindsight, when the act becomes impossible, can we say with anything approaching certainty that in some cases assassination can be a good. In reality we muddle along, ignorant of the future’s shape and in those cases, the real-world cases, there are vanishingly few cases that justify assassination and last week, no matter how odious he may have been, does not meet those criteria.

Secret Morgue 6: 666 Satanic Panic

Film Geeks SD

Saturday September 13 saw the sixth Secret Morgue movie festival, a marathon of 6 theme-linked horror films screened all day and into the late night at the Comic-Con Museum in Balboa Park by San Diego Film Geeks. Being the 6th the theme was announced to be ‘satanic panic.’ I have attended 4 previous regular Secret Morgue screenings and one special two years ago with a unifying theme of witches and witchcraft, loving and enjoying each marathon.

Contempo III Productions

The first feature was the only film I had already seen, 1966’s Incubus. Performed entirely in the constructed language of Esperanto, the film stars William Shatner just before he began his work on Star Trek. The plot revolves around a collection of demons who lure corrupted and evil people to their doom and damnation, but one Kia longs to bring a good person, a hero, to hell and sets her sights on Marc (William Shatner), igniting a battle of wills and temptations for Marc’s soul. I liked this film and enjoyed watching it again after so many years.

Shaprio-Glickenhouse Productions

Black Roses (1988), a limited budget movie produced in Canada, followed as the second feature. A satanic heavy metal group making their first non-studio performance has come to the quite small town of Mill Basin. The kids are drawn to the group, while the parents fear the music and musicians. The twist is the group truly are agents of Satan and converts the teenagers to corruption and evil with only an ineffectual English teacher opposing them. I honestly could not determine if Black Roses had been intended as comedy or was actually that badly made.

Yuma FIlma 75

Things improved with the 3rd feature, Alucarda, a Mexican film from 1977. The filmmaker’s daughter was present to introduce the film and speak briefly about her father.

Censored in Mexico, Alucarda is a very loose adaptation of the 1872 novel Carmilla. Justine, a teenage girl recently orphaned, has come to live in a convent and quickly becomes fast friends with Alucarda. The girls are accosted by stereotypical ‘Gypsies’ and soon fall under dark Satanic influences bringing terror and death to the convent.

Universal Studios

The 4th film was one I hadn’t seen but had wanted to for some time: Sam Raimi’s Drag me to Hell, long heralded as the director’s return to horror after his foray into superhero movies with the original Spider-Man trilogy. The audience was treated to a special video introduction by Sam Raimi and his brother Ivan who had together co-written the script.

Loan officer Christine Brown, trying to prove herself ‘tough enough’ for an important promotion and chafing from her simple rural roots, denies a woman a third extension on her mortgage and in the following altercation, the woman, again a film stereotype of a ‘gypsy’ takes deep offense. She lays a curse on Christine, proclaiming soon it will be Christine who comes to beg. Christine now suffers a ticking clock to find a method to escape the curse before a demon arises and literally drags her to hell.

Orion Pictures

After a dinner break of pizza, we returned for the fifth movie 1990’s Satanically-powered serial killer movie The First Power. I can’t decide which was the greater ignorance displayed by the filmmakers, their understanding of the American criminal justice system or their comprehension of Christian theology.

Detective Russell Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) receives tips and guidance from an anonymous psychic Tess (Tracye Griffith) leading to the capture of a notorious active serial killer but as a price for her assistance, she extracts a promise from Logan that the killer will not be subjected to the death penalty. (A decision that is not in the hands of any police detective.) The killer is executed and resurrects as a body possession spirit leading Logan and Tess on a chase for an immortal serial killer wielding the first power, Resurrection.

Generation International Pictures

The festival ended with a screening of a blaxploitation film, Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil’s Sun-in-Law.

Released in 1977, Petey Wheatstraw is a movie of its time, place, and unique production. A true ‘blaxploitation’ movie, it was created, produced and performed by black actors and creatives, telling jokes that were tasteless at the time and today no white production could even begin to approach. It’s a common sentiment that Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today but trust me when I say that Saddles doesn’t come close to the boundary-breaking tone of Petey Wheatstraw.

Petey, (Rudy Ray Moore) after being brought to life by Lucifer following being gunned down at a funeral by rivals is empowered to seek revenge provided he marries Lucifer’s daughter, a woman of unspeakable ugliness.

I cannot speak fully to this feature. The hour had drawn late, and my vitality flagged, and I have limited tolerance for literal scatological humor. I can say that this was intended to be funny, unlike Black Roses, and before I left, I had laughed, heartily, several times. Petey Wheatstraw is streaming, and I may still finish the movie.

That was the Secret Morgue for 2025, and I can hardly wait for the next one.

A Touch of Leather and a Taste of Lidocaine

Two interesting personal developments for me this week.

Almost a month ago I wrote about my less than thrilling or relaxing trip to the wonderful city of Seattle for this year’s World Science Fiction Convention. As I said, the convention itself was really good but losing my wallet and keys during the trip up cast a pall over the entire week that left me terribly stressed and unable to thoroughly enjoy my vacation.

Monday of this week, I arrived at my desk to begin another week at the day job and after pulling out my laptop from my backpack/computer bag I heard something shifting inside. I reached deep into the bag and the tips of my fingers touched …. leather?

I grabbed the leather object and pulled out my wallet. I reached in again and my fingers found my key ring with an assortment of keys.

Clearly what had happened was that at TSA in San Diego after passing through the check point, I had hastily grabbed everything, laptop, iPad, wallet and keys and shoved them all into the bag. The heightened stress and emotional stessors disrupted my memory formation just enough that I had and still do not have a memory of pushing the items into the bag.

It’s good to know that they were not lost and no one got ahold of them, but it is frustrating.

Yesterday, in a quest by my pulmonologist to quiet a persistent cough I have experienced since February of 2024 I underwent a bronchoscopy, a procedure where they put a camera down into your airways and lungs.

The nurses at Kaiser Zion Hospital were excellent but let me tell you having lidocaine sprayed into the back of your throat is a terrible, terrible experience. It prompted gagging and coughing and had a taste I would not wish upon my worst enemy. The procedure itself was hardly a bother, though apparently from the sedation I was out for about half of it. The test results indicated nothing abnormal in my airways or lungs and so the search for a solution to the coughing continues.

Yesterday’s Murder

Yesterday, September 10th, a gunman shot and killed Charlie Kirk, a political activist known for inflammatory rhetoric, a disdain for empathy, and a verbally vicious manner. I will not bother to pretend that Charlie Kirk’s absence from American political life will cause me the slightest element of concern. He struck me as a petty, cruel man that monetized hate, and did little to nothing to actually make life better for people and actively made it worse for the targets of the hate from which he profited so generously.

I have sympathies for his children. It is never easy to lose a parent, and their tragedy is quite real. The majority of my sympathy is for the United States and the American people. Not because they are deprived of Charlie Kirk’s rancor and rabble rousing, as I have said I do not think in any manner that he was even within the same galaxy as the definition of a ‘good person,’ but the growing politically driven violence in our culture is a terrible infection that may have now grown beyond any quick and decisive treatment.

A few hours after the killing, writer Ezra KlEin posted a list of political violence this nation witnessed over the last few years with victims from both ends of the political spectrum. Political violence is an infection; in the absence of political antibiotics it grows and spreads eventually, if unchecked, becoming gangrenous.

I’m not going to spend time laying the blame to one faction or another. For the most part, persuasion has vanished from the political discourse and examples of hypocrisy or ill intent are only deployed now to burnish one’s own side or to soothe the feelings one might have because deep down they know theIR guilt lies there.

I do not mourn Charlie Kirk, but I do mourn our nation and what will be, I suspect, a long and painful road back to something like normalcy.

A 40th Cinematic Anniversary

2025 witnessed the 50th year of the cinematic experience of Jaws, the movie that in many ways invented the summer blockbuster. A decade later, studios chased those blockbuster dreams still, and 1985 saw the release of a number of box office-dominating and franchise-creating films such as Back to the Future and Rambo: First Blood Part II.

Warner Brothers

But today I want to remember a film that turned 40 this summer, got two thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert, performed modestly with audiences but became beloved by its fans and grew into cult status. Even four decades after its release, lines from this modestly budgeted absurdist comedy such as “Gee, Ricky, I’m sorry your mom blew up” or “When people be throwing away a perfectly good white boy like that!” still make us crack a smile and have the same import as more famous deliveries like “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

I’m talking about the debut feature film by director and writer Savage Steve Holland, Better Off Dead.

Better Off Dead is the story of Lane Meyer (John Cusack), a high school student dumped by his girlfriend Beth (Amanda Wyss) and thrown into cycles of suicidal ideation and desperate plays to win back her attention and affection from her new boyfriend Roy Stalin. A parallel storyline follows the arrival of a French foreign exchange student Monique (Diane Franklin) to the home across the street from Lane’s and the hosting family’s attempts to create a romantic relationship between Monique and the son living there.

This brief and dry synopsis conveys none of the strange, bizarre, and inventive humor of the film. There’s Lane’s mother, whose cooking can create life; the paperboy whose demand to be paid what he’s owed strikes tones more akin to the mafia than a young boy’s first job; and the fact that the film breaks out into fantastic, animated segments drawn from Lane’s fertile imagination.

I watched Better Off Dead on its initial release, and I loved it wholly and completely. My friends and I still make references to this movie and quote its iconic lines to this day. Like Monty Python, it is not to everyone’s taste, but for those it matches, it is priceless.

My Newest Musical Crush — Laufey

A little over a month ago, towards the end of July, my sweetie-wife and I listened to the NPR news/comedy program Wait, Wait — Don’t Tell Me as we drove to the world-famous San Diego Zoo for our Sunday excursion. That week’s guest was singer/songwriter Laufey (English pronunciation of her name is basically LAY-VEY).

NPR

Laufey is an Icelandic woman whom I had never heard of before this episode. She came off as funny, intelligent, and charming in the brief interview which comprises the middle segment of the weekly program. In the interview, the host questioned how Laufey became attracted to jazz, not something one normally expects from a currently popular Icelandic musician.

For the last several years I have been getting more and more into bossa nova jazz, and the music it has inspired over the decades, so I naturally had to at least give some of her recordings a try. Luckily, I subscribe to Apple Music and that meant as I drove to work, I could simply ask Siri to play random songs by Laufey.

Man, I was hooked right away.

She sings both classic standards from the Great American Songbook and her own compositions. The music is unique and deeply personal. It’s easy to see why when I looked into a performance coming up in San Diego, the program was already sold out.

It’s so nice that even now I can still discover and fall in love with new musicians and their art.

Strange New Worlds Goes to Hell — In the Pacific

Fans watching this week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where pilot Erica Ortegas is

Credit: Paramount Pictures

marooned on a planetoid with an enemy of the Federation, can be forgiven if they think that the plot was lifted from the 1985 film Enemy Mine. Of course, fans with a more extensive knowledge of televised SF programming might think that film lifted its plot from the final episode of Galactica 80: The Return of Starbuck. This ignores that the 85 film was an adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s 1979 Hugo winning novella of the same name.

If we go beyond the science-fiction genre, we get to what might be the Ur-text of the modern incarnation of this plot, the 1968 feature film, Hell in the Pacific.

Warriors from opposing sides stranded and forced to work together to survive, eventually overcoming their prejudices towards each other, is a powerful metaphor for life in general and it is not surprising that it feels like it has been adapted and readapted as many times as the plot of The Seven Samurai.

Episode 9 of this season, Terrarium, sees Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), after taking a shuttle craft into a gravitational anomaly, stranded on the moon of a gas giant only to discover that a Gorn pilot has also crashed here. Ortegas, a survivor of a brutal Gorn assault, has to grow beyond her personal terrors and emotional trauma to join forces with the alien pilot if they are both to survive until Enterprise can locate and rescue them.

Terrarium echoes the original series episode The Galileo Seven as the ship, tasked with delivering vaccines to a plague-stricken colony, faces a ticking clock that will force Pike to abandon the search for their missing officer. It is a nice bit of lore in the episode that the Enterprise is scheduled to rendezvous with the starship Constellation and its captain, Decker. Ortegas’ solution to alerting her crewmates as to the location of her crash also feels borrowed from that original series episode.

While the elements copied over from the original series are detracting from this episode, I still very much enjoyed it. Unlike Hell in the Pacific, The Return of Starbuck, or Enemy Mine, Ortegas’ history and emotional trauma makes this a more personal story and therefore one of greater growth than the other explorations of this concept. That does not diminish the other interpretations; each has their own charm and message about seeing past the surface of another and are worthy of enjoyment, even the Galactica 80 episode.

This Non-Productivity Is Brought to You by the Letter E

One of my most productive writing times is during my day job’s lunch hour. I eat a fast lunch, usually a microwaved single serving meal, and when that’s done, spend the rest of the hour writing on my MacBook.

I can get anywhere from 800 to 1200 words written, and because I use my iPhone as a hotspot not a byte of that writing passes through my employer’s corporate network. (Call me paranoid but I am a firm believer in keeping all personal data off an employer’s network.)

This week is proving to be frustrating in more than one manner.

First off, I have come to some conclusions about the plot with very serious implications and great dramatic potential, but they require that I really work out the backstory elements that in my writing by-the-seat-of-my-pants, I haven’t yet considered.

More impactful is that the key for the letter ‘E’ on my MacBook is now acting up like a frustrated two-year-old. Sometimes, quite often really, it doesn’t register the strike, and I end up with a word missing one or more Es. Other times it gets stuck, and I am suddenly confronted with a long string of the most used vowel in the English language.

I have an appointment on Saturday morning to have the machine serviced, but until then my productivity is taking a serious hit. Yesterday I managed a mere 200 words as my stream of creative thought was constantly interrupted while I inserted or deleted Es in various bits of text.

This will not be a long period of hampered writing, and I still have high hopes that the first draft of Cult Movie (working title) will be completed by the end of the month.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur