#larry buchanan just doesn’t care

[mst3kproject]

The Naked Witch

According to Wikipedia, this is the movie that launched Larry Buchanan’s career.  Considering that Buchanan is best-known for shitty colour re-makes of black and white monster movies that weren’t very good to begin with, I don’t know if ‘launch’ is the right word.  That kind of thing doesn’t so much ‘launch’ as it does slide into the water and immediately capsize, like the SS Daphne.

A graduate student arrives at a small German village in central Texas, hoping to learn more about the superstitions and religious beliefs these people brought with them from the Old Country.  Nobody really wants to talk to him until he meets a young woman called Kirska, who gives him a book about the town’s history. This tells the tale of a woman who was executed for witchcraft a century earlier.  The student is able to locate the witch’s grave and, for some reason he never shares with the audience, digs her up.  When he removes the stake that was driven through her black heart, she resurrects and sets out to take revenge on the descendants of the people who condemned her, including the beautiful Kirska herself!

You know, I’ve watched a lot of bad movies in my life.  This became my hobby twenty-five years ago, when some friends and I decided to rent a video and ended up with the MST3K movie.  I’ve been through the show’s entire catalogue and quite a few of the Brains’ side projects, not to mention the films I’ve dug up for this blog.  You’d think that by now I would have seen it all… but every so often I still encounter something that absolutely floors me with how awful it is, and The Naked Witch managed it several times.

Right, first question, and the one that would have been foremost in the minds of Tom and Crow: is the witch actually naked?  Technically, the answer is yes… she rises from the grave without clothes, though her hair is nicely curled and she’s got mascara and red lipstick on.  A few minutes later she’s found something to wear, and in the meantime she’s always behind props or only in the shot from the shoulders up or knees down.  Later there’s maybe a few seconds of nipple during a scene when she takes a swim in a pond, but MST3K could have cut that without losing anything.  The title is merely a trap for those hoping to see some titties.

So if no boobs, what do we get to see?  The answer is almost nothing.  The Naked Witch never shows us anything if it can tell us, and it is terrible at telling.  We begin with a punishingly long preamble about the history of witchcraft from some guy with a bad case of 50’s Radio Announcer Voice, over selections from the works of Bruegel and Bosch.  This segment is some eight minutes long in a fifty-nine minute movie and accomplishes nothing except to make us hope we’ll see somebody have sex with Satan in the upcoming film – which we will not.

Then we get another long-ass voiceover, this one from the student who has come to central Texas to study the cultural traditions of German families who immigrated there in the 19th century.  This one provides a little bit of background to what we’ll be seeing but most of it is just filling time and now I’m craving Maultaschen.  By the time we get to the plot we have wasted a fifth of the movie on just listening to these guys talk.

Our supposed protagonist (for want of a better word), the grad student, is a complete nonentity.  He narrates most of the movie without any sign of interest or excitement.  He never even has a name.  He never introduces himself, nobody ever addresses him, and even the credits just call him ‘the student’.  Almost every time something interesting ought to be happening in the movie, what we see is people standing around and talking while he tells us about it.  He narrates running out of gas and walking into town.  He narrates meeting Kirska and her grandfather and great uncle, the last remaining members of their family.

Later, he narrates digging up the dead witch and pulling the stake out of her heart, although he never tells us why he does either of these things… he doesn’t even bother to say something like I don’t know why I did it, I felt weirdly compelled, which would have implied black magic manipulating him. This was an option, since he later says he’s under some kind of spell that prevents him telling anybody who’s responsible for the murders the witch commits.  He narrates the process of finding her new lair and narrates being enchanted by her.  I found myself thinking of The Creeping Terror and wondering if the backstory were similar… maybe they’d somehow lost or broken their sound equipment after only filming a few scenes, and just had to make do.  The Internet has no answers for me.

On the rare occasions when the movie does show us something, it’s not something that’s very interesting to see. We do get to see the student flirt briefly with Kirska, but I don’t know if they’re supposed to have Fallen In Love because their relationship is never developed… the threat to Kirska is what enables him to shake off the witch’s spell, so… maybe?  We get a flashback that shows us the witch in life, condemned by her lover who blames her for his wife’s illness, but this is one scene of the two arguing just before her arrest, in the same bedroom set where the Student is reading his book in the 20th century.  We see the witch rise nude from the grave and steal some clothes.  We see the boring and poorly-shot murders.  And we watch at great length as the witch swims in the pond, casts a spell on the student, and then makes out with him.

All this time could have been spent so much better. How about the student trying to ask various townsfolk questions about their history and being turned away? That would have been far more effective than hearing him talk about it!  How about a torch-and-pitchfork mob coming to tear down the innkeeper’s doors to get at the witch?  This would have cemented the impression we get that he turned her in so as to save his own skin.  What about showing us how Kirska is dealing with the deaths of her family members and the looming knowledge that she, too, is on the witch’s hit list?  How about having her turn to the student for comfort, only to start suspecting he’s responsible… but the spell on him makes him unable to tell her, almost ending their love story before it can begin?  How about giving the main characters some fucking names?!

There’s so much to hate in The Naked Witch, so much they did wrong… but one thing that stood out to me is the way the movie handles the witch herself and the whole idea of witchcraft. The opening narration talks about witches as a real phenomenon, a scourge of medieval Europe that had to be stamped out.  It’s rare to find a fictional interpretation of the age of witch hunting that paints the inquisition as the good guys, even in worlds where witchcraft does exist – think of The Touch of Satan – but here’s one!  When the student tells Kirska about his academic work, however, he explains that witch-hunting is a manifestation of social stress and misogyny.  In times of plague, famine, war, and general upheaval, people need somebody to blame and witches were the scapegoat of choice.

This seems to be upheld by the flashback scene with the witch and her lover.  She wants him to abandon his sick wife and marry her, but he doesn’t want to ruin his reputation or to leave town and start anew.  An epidemic in the area has already got people suspecting witchcraft, so he throws his mistress to the mob and gets out of trouble for cheating on his wife by claiming he was under a spell.

All that makes sense all right… except that it just doesn’t square with the narrated opening, which was all about how witches are totally real and totally evil.  So… what, exactly, gives here?  When all I had was the opening narration versus the student’s opinion, I got worried that the movie was saying sheltered ivory tower academics may handwave it all away but the truth is that women really are evil. Then that was shot down by the scene with the witch and her boyfriend, which seems to tell us pretty plainly (in fact, she literally says it in so many words) that she is not a witch and there are probably no such things.

But… but then the witch actually does come back from the dead, kill people, and enchant the student, just as she promised when she was put to the torch.  I guess she could have been lying when she insisted she wasn’t a witch – she’s not just gonna admit it to the mob who wants to burn her, after all – but the flashback scene went to such trouble to paint her as innocent and her boyfriend as the asshole, it doesn’t seem likely.  Maybe she’s less a witch than she is a zombie, a corpse animated by the need for revenge like Tony from Zombie Nightmare.  But if so, why is she able to cast an actual spell on the student?  Did the writers even know?

They abso-fucking-lutely did not.  At the end of the movie the student observes that he’ll never know if she were actually a witch or just a victim.  There are movies in which this kind of thing would work, but they have to walk a fine line of ambiguity in order to do so.  The Naked Witch fails miserably to strike that balance.  It just shows us (or, more often, tells us) a set of mutually contradictory things and never even imply that they are reconcilable.  So yeah, for Larry Buchanan’s so-called career, The Naked Witch truly was a sign of things to come.  Even at the very beginning, he just didn’t care!

[darter-blue]

And now for some stucky fluff...

Read it here on ao3

Or part one, two, three, four on tumblr

Bucky’s sense has left him. It left him somewhere back on the dance floor. Maybe even before then.

It’s entirely possible that in fact he’s never had any.

He spent too long talking at Steve about particles… about soulmates… about whatever it is that's happening between them. And by some miracle, Steve is still listening, still looking at Bucky like he’s interesting, like his words mean something. And Bucky needs to harness that. Needs to grab at it before it slips through his fingers.

So he quits his yapping. He grabs Steve and he pulls at him again, marvels at the complete lack of resistance there, at the way Steve just follows him. When he dares to look back over his shoulder, Steve is still there, still staring at Bucky as if he is something wondrous. Somehow not tripping, or faltering, despite not watching at all where he’s going and or paying any kind of attention to the people or the noise or the chaos of the casino around them.

Steve’s eyes are only for Bucky.

Even as Bucky pulls them through the garishly painted doors. Even as Bucky leads him into madness.

Bucky turns away from Steve to face forward, to push clear of the doors and let them swing closed behind them.

It’s much quieter in the chapel.

Bucky sweeps his eyes from right to left and takes in the pastel pink walls, the blue ribbons along the pews, the couple chatting at the top of the aisle. One dressed as Elvis - white jumpsuit and cape, big hair, sunglasses, guitar flung over one shoulder, not slim, but filling out that jumpsuit nicely all the same - the other wearing a hot pink t-shirt that reads ‘we will wed you’ in white lettering across the chest and a fifties retro polka dot skirt.

They both look up as Steve and Bucky enter.

‘He-ey,’ the man dressed as Elvis says, smile and eyes widening as he looks past Bucky and up and up to Steve, then back down and up again. One eyebrow raising in slight disbelief, no doubt, at the existence of such a perfect being.

Bucky can’t blame him.

‘Welcome, welcome!’ the woman in hot pink says, coming forward, arms outstretched, ‘hello boys!’

‘Hello,’ Bucky says, smiling at her exuberance, and her very excellent blond bee-hive up-do, and slows to a stop about halfway down the aisle.

‘Ma’am,’ Steve says, affability dripping from the buttery smooth tone in his voice, coming to a stop on Bucky’s right.

‘Oh, you two look like a match made in heaven!’ the woman says, stopping a few feet from them, she holds up her hands and makes a frame with her fingers, placing Bucky and Steve in it and looking through at them with one narrowed eye. ‘Oh yes. Beautiful, beautiful.’

‘Uh…’ Bucky starts, and falters. At a loss for exactly how to proceed.

He looks up at Steve and Steve looks down at him with an encouraging smile, slides an arm around Bucky’s waist and squeezes him closer.

‘We umm… do we have to make an appointment?’

‘You two?’ the woman says, eyeing them both up and down, ‘no appointments necessary, come come come.’ She spins around and starts heading towards Elvis, checking back to make sure Bucky and Steve are following her, ‘Come with me, I’m going to take care of everything.’

‘Okay,’ Bucky says, looking up and Steve and shrugging his shoulders.

Steve laughs and squeezes Bucky tighter, walking them down the aisle together. ‘How do you make everybody fall in love with you like this, Buck?’

‘Me?’ Bucky says, laughing and shaking his head at Steve. As if Steve has no idea of the kind of magnetism he’s exuding. The uncanny resemblance he has to a greek god.

‘Yes, definitely you,’ Steve says, ‘People are never this easy with me.’

‘I am,’ Bucky says truthfully. Everything about Steve screams home to Bucky. Screams safety and happiness. Bucky couldn’t be anything but easy with him.

‘Yes you are,’ Steve says softly. Squeezing Bucky again. He’s going to have to stop doing that, it's so warm, his arm is so strong, his hand is so big, Bucky feels encased by him. It’s dangerously addictive. Bucky wants to lean into it and let himself go.

But, actually, why can't he? This is a chapel, they are about to leap into the craziest decision Bucky has ever made in his life... So Bucky does lean into it. Lets his side press into Steve, lets them fit together like a solved puzzle.

‘Okay boys, we have some forms, we have some catalogues,’ the woman says, gesturing them into a room off to the side of the chapel, ‘I need you to put your decision making hats on, okay? We have about thirty minutes before the next couple comes in and I want to slot you right in, yes?’

‘Okay,’ Bucky and Steve say together, nodding their heads.

‘Good, good. So take a look over these, sign them, pick your rings and I’ll charge them all to your room. You’re staying in the casino right?’

‘Yes,’ Steve says, moving forward before Bucky can answer, ‘Charge it to my room, please.’

Steve starts pulling out his wallet, shows his identification and takes the pen the lady offers him, and Bucky watches with a sort of fascination, as Steve becomes completely in control.

‘Steve Rogers,’ the woman says with a smile Bucky doesn’t understand. Knowing, familiar. ‘I’m Mavis, it’s so lovely to meet you.’

‘And you,’ Steve says. He opens his arm out to Bucky to gesture him forward, and slides it around Bucky’s shoulder when he gets close enough. ‘This is Bucky.’

‘James Buchanan Barnes,’ Bucky says, holding out a hand for Mavis to shake, ‘pleasure to meet you, Mavis.’

‘Oh well you are just the sweetest thing,’ Mavis says with a chuckle, her cheeks blushing, ‘absolutely adorable.’ She pushes a catalogue towards Bucky, ‘Find your rings, darlin’ while Steve here fills out the paperwork. I just need some signatures from both of you and I’ll set up everything with Larry over there,’ she points to Elvis who waves back at them from the altar, ‘while you pop out and find yourselves a witness.’

‘Can’t you be our witness, Mavis?’ Bucky asks. He doesn’t want to unpack the kind of recklessness that it takes to be getting married in a seedy casino wedding chapel and needing to nab random strangers to be their witnesses.

‘Oh of course I will, darlin’ boy, but you need two. And Larry is the officiator, he can’t be a witness I’m afraid.’

‘It’s no problem,’ Steve says, looking up from the paperwork and handing Bucky the pen, ‘You sign these and pick out the rings, Buck, I’ll go grab somebody.’

‘Ahh... sure,’ Bucky takes the pen and watches as Steve takes off on a mission, ‘I’ll just… pick out my wedding ring from this plastic catalogue…’

‘Okay,’ Mavis says, bustling about in the small room and not watching Bucky at all, ‘Here are your complimentary t-shirts,’ she pulls some material from a storage box under the counter, ‘here is your album,’ Mavis plonks a hot pink vinyl photo album right next to Bucky’s ring catalogue, ’and here’s your notepad.’

‘Notepad?’ Bucky looks at Mavis and then down at the small notepad, blue and pink and with a vegas sign as a watermark in the background.

‘You might want to jot some quick vows down, honey.’

‘Oh.’

It occurs to Bucky, as he looks down at his coloured notepad, at the ring catalogue on laminated sheets of pink paper, at the t-shirts Mavis has put down for them on the counter, that this is perhaps a terrible mistake.

And then he looks a little closer at one of the rings on the last page… plain white gold (plated, he’s guessing) flat bands with an inscription on the inside that reads, ‘For we are but two halves, together whole’ and wonders if in fact it's the opposite of a mistake.

What if this is fate?

‘Bucky, I found somebody,’ Steve comes tearing back into the chapel followed by a dazed looking man, wide eyed and smiling, looking up at Steve as if he just met the messiah. ‘This is Scott.’

‘Hi Scott,’ Bucky says, dragging the man’s attention away from Steve, ‘thank you so much for doing this.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Scott says, beaming back up at Steve, ‘for this guy? Anything.’

He looks starstruck - Bucky can totally understand where he’s coming from.

Scott is absolutely bouncing on the balls of his feet, ‘You are a lucky guy, Bucky.’

Bucky looks at Steve, who is looking worriedly between Scott and Bucky, reminding Bucky momentarily of a confused puppy, and has to wholeheartedly agree.

‘You still sure about this, Buck?’ Steve asks, puppy dog eyes kicking into full gear.

Bucky can’t help but smile. ‘I um… found these I sort of like,’ Bucky says in lieu of an answer, pointing to the picture of the rings on the laminated page, ‘what do you think?’

Steve looks down at them, at the inscription decsribed underneath the picture and looks back up at Bucky with the softest, sweetest smile. ‘They look perfect.’

‘Yeah? You think so?’

‘I do.’

And Bucky’s heart melts. He feels the warmth of it spread right through his chest.

‘Perfect!’ Mavis cries, swooping in to grab the catalogue and disappear into the chapel, yelling back ‘get yourselves to the altar boys!’

‘I guess we ah… head out there?’ Bucky gestures over his shoulder with his thumb, to the altar, ‘let me just um…’ he jots down a few lines and then rips the page off and hands the notepad to Steve, ‘for your vows.’

‘Ahh…’ Steve looks adorably terrified at the notepad Bucky has just handed him and looks over at Scott who is smiling at both of them now.

‘You guys look good together,’ Scott says, grabbing them both around their biceps and pushing them together, ‘this is really special. Thanks for letting me be a part of this, Cap.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Steve says, calm but bemused as Scott’s hands keep squeezing.

Bucky looks up at Steve and then back at Scott who almost seems to be tearing up.

‘You guys know each other?’

‘I wish,’ Scott says, shaking his head with a laugh, ‘what a dream this night has turned out to be.’

And Bucky can’t help but laugh. It’s just crazy enough to be perfect for this evening. ‘For you and me both,’ Bucky says. And Scott squeezes his arm a little tighter. ‘We even have this t-shirt for you.’

Scott takes the t-shirt Bucky offers him reverently. ‘Viva las witness,’ he says with awe. ‘This is amazing.’

‘And for you, sir,’ Bucky says, handing one to Steve.

‘Thank you, Buck’ Steve says, standing back from them both to pull off the button down he’s wearing.

Bucky can’t stop the gasp that escapes as Steve’s shirt slides down his arms to reveal the wide expanse of chiseled porcelain perfection underneath.

Steve smiles at Bucky’s no doubt slack jawed expression but Bucky can’t look away. It’s… a lot. IKt’s more muscle than Bucky has ever seen on a real live person. Toned and smooth and carved out of marble.

What is Bucky getting himself into?

Steve is pulling the pink ‘groom’ shirt over his chest and down over his washboard abs and Bucky has to hold his hand back from reaching out to touch him, to slip his fingers under the soft material of the t-shirt.

‘Your turn, Buck,’ Steve says, staring at Bucky with one eyebrow raised, handing him the blue shirt.

‘Uh-uh.’ Bucky shakes his head. 'Nope, not after that,' he waves his hand in the direction of Steve's chest, 'no thank you.'

'Buck?'

'I don't look anything like that.'

'Nobody looks anything like that,' Scott says, his eyebrows still at his hairline.

'Scott, could you give us five minutes?'

'Yeah, I'll just…' Scott backs out of the room and towards the altar, 'let me choose you some music. Be right back.'

'Bucky,' Steve steps closer as Scott disappears, 'you don't have to do anything you're not comfortable with.'

Bucky lets him closer, but doesn't move.

'But this,' Steve puts his hands to his giant pecs, nearly breaking through the t-shirt, 'this is not what makes me, me.'

'I know,' Bucky tucks his hair behind his ear, nodding his head 'I know that.' He does know that. But it’s hard to not be intimidated by his perfection.

'And as beautiful as you are,' Steve says, reaching out to take Bucky's hand and hold it, put it up against Bucky’s chest, 'this isn't what makes you, you.' Steve presses the finger of his free hand against Bucky’s forehead. 'This is, Buck. This is you, yes?'

'Yes.' And it’s true. He forgets that sometimes but it’s true.

'And it's amazing, you're amazing.'

'I am?' Is he? Bucky doesn’t feel amazing. He feels like he’s just scraping by most of the time.

'You are.'

Steve is looking down at him with so much affection, Bucky knows it’s not a line. It’s what Steve really thinks.

'You are too,' Bucky lifts his own free hand to touch Steve's forehead, 'you're so lovely.'

Steve leans in as Bucky traces his hand down to his cheek and rests his forehead against Bucky's. 'You don't have to wear the t-shirt, Bucky,' Steve says softly, running his hand through Bucky’s hair, 'You don't ever have to do anything you don't want to do.'

Steve's hands on him are like a balm. They radiate care and calm, and they speak Steve's truth.

Bucky’s insecurity washes away. He wants to be part of this. He wants to be all in. 'I do want to wear the t-shirt,' Bucky whispers, 'It's cute.'

Steve laughs and almost snorts. 'It's perfect for you.' Steve nods. 'Want me to give you some privacy?'

'No,’ Bucky doesn’t want Steve to go anywhere. ‘No I want you to help me.’

Bucky takes Steve’s hands in his own and places them gently at the hem of his t-shirt - faded and worn and washed too many times, all the more comfortable because of it.

Steve slides his hands up under the hem and over the bare skin above Bucky’s waistband, dragging the tips of his fingers across Bucky’s stomach. Bucky breaths in a sharp gasp of air as Steve’s thumb runs over his hip bone.

‘Gorgeous,’ Steve sighs the word, his breath on Bucky’s lips, he’s so close.

Bucky lifts his arms to let Steve run his fingers up further, taking the material of the shirt with him and lifting it slowly over Bucky’s head. He runs his hands back down Bucky’s chest, fingertips burning into Bucky’s skin, charged and electric.

They slow at Bucky’s stomach, sliding around the smooth, slightly rounded softness of Bucky’s waist to settle on his hips, rubbing circles over the bone with his thumbs.

‘Beautiful,’ Steve whispers, ‘you’re perfect, Bucky.’

‘Thank you,’ Bucky whispers back. Not because Steve has said it, but because he’s made Bucky believe it.

Steve’s nuzzles closer, reaching up to kiss his lips against Bucky’s forehead, Bucky settles his hands on Steve’s chest, up to Steve’s shoulders and around his neck-

‘Showtime boys!’ Mavis says, bursting into the room and then throwing a hand over her eyes as Steve and Bucky jump apart, ‘Oops! Sorry, but you need to get your sweet little butts out there, we’re running out of time.’

‘Yep, sorry, sorry,’ Bucky grabs for the blue t-shirt, ‘Elvis said we do’ plastered across the front in bright pink lettering, ‘coming right out.’

‘Better late than never,’ Mavis says with a wink to Steve and Bucky laughs at the blush that creeps into his cheeks.

‘Shit,’ Steve writes quickly in the notepad as they both hustle out to the altar, Scott off to the side pairing his phone with the sound system as ‘Fools rush in’ starts up over the speakers and Larry-Elvis smiles down at them as they move into position on either side of where he stands a step above them.

Steve tucks the notepad into his pocket and shuffles his feet. Bucky stands straight and reaches for his hands, pulls them into the space between them, holds them there, safe between Bucky’s own.

‘Welcome folks,’ Larry-Elvis drawls, ‘We’re gonna keep this short and sweet, I as a certified official in the state of Nevada, do preside over these two young men, to bring them together in holy matrimony-’

Steve catches Bucky’s eye and bites his lip. Bucky can only look back and try and keep from vibrating out of his skin.

‘-James Buchanan Barnes, did you have some words for Steve,’

‘Ah, yep…’ Bucky says, grabbing the torn out page from the pocket of his jeans, ‘Ah, Steven-’

‘-Grant,’ Steve says quietly.

‘Steven Grant Rogers, somehow it feels like I’ve known you forever. Somehow I feel like tonight I have met the kindest, most wonderful man in the world.’

‘It’s so true,’ Scott says quietly from behind them, and it makes Bucky smile.

‘Whatever brought us together, whatever force has drawn us to each other… It feels like fate, Steve. I think maybe you’re my person.’

Steve is nodding, smiling, he squeezes Bucky’s fingers.

‘And Steve?’ Larry-Elvis asks, ‘did you have words too, son?’

‘Yeah I…’ Steve doesn’t reach for his notepad, he looks at Bucky and squares his shoulders, lifts his chin, ‘James Buchanan Barnes, my heart knows you. However our particles have danced together through time, I found you here and now, and I’m going to hold on for as long as I can-’

‘Oh, god,’ Scott sobs behind them.

‘-I think you’re right about fate, Buck, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life, just being a part of yours.’

‘Beautiful!’ Mavis cries, running over with the rings, ‘Rings boys, time to wrap it up.’

Bucky has to smile at the chaos, at Steve’s face as he bites his cheek and tries not to laugh. He checks back at Scott to see him taking video of the ceremony and hopes that he can watch this in the morning, sober, and remember how light his heart is right now.

‘That was beautiful, Steve-Steve Rogers,’ Bucky says leaning in to whisper.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Steve says back and they smile at each other like idiots as Mavis hands them their rings and the song fades out on Elvis singing about falling in love. It couldn’t be more perfect.

‘You may kiss the groom, fellas,’ Larry says with a sweeping hand, ‘I now pronounce you husband and husband.’

And all of the noise fades away around them as Steve steps in, brings their joined hands up to their chests and reaches down to rest his lips against Bucky’s.

‘May I?’ he whispers against Bucky’s mouth.

‘Fuck yes,’ Bucky whispers back, and Steve laughs as he closes that last tiny distance, presses his warm lips softly to Bucky’s and opens them just enough to fit their mouths together.

The tenderness of it has Bucky in freefall.

He sighs into the taste of Steve’s lips, the luscious sweep of them against Bucky’s, and Steve has to let go of Bucky’s hands to reach around and grab him, take Bucky’s weight where he has dropped into Steve’s hold, pressing deeper into the kiss as he does, opening wider to it, gently nudging his tongue against Bucky’s and Bucky pushes back, licks softly into Steve’s mouth, sucks at the plumpness of his bottom lip, reaches his hands up around Steve’s neck and holds on.

The bang of the confetti canon has Steve snapping back up to standing, pulling Bucky with him and wrapping his arms around him, as if to shield him. Looking up and then back at Bucky as the coloured paper rains down on them.

Bucky can't help huffing a happy laugh at his husband. His husband.

‘Congratulations!’ Mavis and Larry-Elvis and Scott all cry from around them, but Bucky’s world is all and only Steve right now. The crystal clear blue of his eyes, the rose of his cheeks, the sharp nose and pink lips, and the look of absolute adoration on his face.

‘Wanna get out of here?’ Bucky asks.

Steve smiles even wider, ducks his head to kiss Bucky again, slow and soft and sweet and whispers into Bucky’s mouth, ‘I do.’

It’s perfect.

[bountyofbeads]

What Happens When Ordinary People End Up in Trump’s Tweets https://nyti.ms/32bCiou

🍁🏈🍂🍻🍁🏈🍂🍻🍁🏈🍂🍻🍁🏈

What Happens When Ordinary People End Up in Trump’s Tweets

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER | Published Nov. 2, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 3, 2019 |

McCALLA, Ala. — The evening of April 29 passed like many others for Ben Rawls, a fire lieutenant in Tuscaloosa: settled in the rocking chair on his porch, amid empty beer cans and mosquito-fighting candles, tweeting to an audience of dozens until he got sleepy.

“Granted I am in Alabama,” Mr. Rawls, 45, wrote around 11 p.m., after a major firefighters’ union endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. for president, “but most of the firefighters I talk to are voting @realDonaldTrump.”

The morning of May 1, some 36 hours later, was less typical.

Mr. Rawls showered and took his daughters to school. He ignored his phone, until it yapped so insistently that he had to look. An ashbin of Twitter comments greeted him: Racist. Moron. “‘Toothless’ — that was a good one,” he recalled.

The most curious posts disputed Mr. Rawls’s very existence. Strangers accused him of being a bot. He replied to one with a video he recorded in his pickup. “Here I am,” he said to the camera. “No faking here.”

All told, it took about 12 hours for him to solve the mystery. Back in his rocking chair, he stared at a fellow Twitter user’s note of congratulations: Mr. Rawls had been retweeted by the president of the United States.

Along with the Republican allies, Fox News hosts and conspiracy-mongering trolls whose messages President Trump pinballs across the political arena, he has also elevated regular people whose words he finds pleasing. Perhaps no group understands the praise-seeking cyclone that is @realDonaldTrump better than these arbitrary few who have lived inside it, briefly and usually unwittingly.

Their brushes with cybercelebrity are a portal into the Twitter feedback loop powered and experienced by Mr. Trump — dark, caustic, skimpy on nuance — where the ripples of a single presidential tweet can be hard to fathom unless measured against the relative anonymity to which these users were accustomed. Mr. Rawls got 2,700 retweets and 14,000 “likes” with the boost from Mr. Trump. The reach of his tweets before and since, he estimated, was approximately zero.

For many of the retweeted, the temporary platform stands as a testament to a style of politics they have never seen before — one that has bonded the president to his followers, virtual or otherwise.

“No other president has ever done stuff like this,” said Curtis Vincent, a 35-year old in Bowling Green, Ky., who operates one of the more than 215 unverified accounts Mr. Trump has retweeted since taking office. “They’ve been on a higher pedestal.”

Mr. Rawls, Mr. Vincent and several others were retweeted by Mr. Trump on May 1 after responding to a post by a Fox News personality, Dan Bongino, about the fire union’s endorsing Mr. Biden.

Joining them in temporary Twitter fame was Joelle Palombo, 46, a Southern California resident with 11 followers, who had largely used her account to cheer on her daughter’s soccer team. But after Mr. Bongino tweeted that “NONE of the firemen” he knew were with Mr. Biden, she replied with a note of support for Mr. Trump from one “fire family” out West.

The flood of reactions so spooked Ms. Palombo that she enlisted her teenage son to help block anyone she saw in her feed. The purge took three days, she said, and included the president, who she did not realize had retweeted her until a reporter told her months later.

“I went and looked at his account, and I blocked him,” Ms. Palombo said of Mr. Trump. “That’s how scared I was. I’m just one tiny hair on a dog. Are you kidding me?”

Although her affection for the president persists, Ms. Palombo questions the value of his favored medium. “How many hours of the day do people put in to do this?” she said. “I don’t need to have a voice on this. I’ll vote.”

Others have found more purpose in the practice. Mr. Rawls described himself as a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. He preferred Ted Cruz during the Republican primary, and he winces at some of the president’s choices, including insulting John McCain well after the senator’s death.

But as the 2020 election approaches, Mr. Rawls suggests, the president’s Twitter output is a more effective galvanizer than even the slickest campaign ad. “The tweeting doesn’t bother me so much anymore,” he said. “I don’t really feel like I wasted a vote.”

And the validation of the president’s retweet has encouraged his own more quarrelsome instincts. “Before all this happened, I would type something out and say, ‘People will think I’m crazy,’” he recalled, citing prospective tweets that he scrapped.

Since May, these second thoughts have been rarer. He has called Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director, a “bitter jerk.” He has shared a doctored video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi appearing to slur her words. He has weaponized a gif of Judge Judy (“Either you are playing dumb, or it’s not an act”) to mock Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat promoting gun control.

“I’m a little bit less of a wallflower than I used to be,” Mr. Rawls said, crediting Mr. Trump’s retweet. “I guess you could say I was more emboldened.”

CATCHING HIS EYE

Capital letters help. Sentence structure can be disregarded. Mornings, East Coast time, are best.

Grabbing Mr. Trump’s attention on Twitter is more art than science — and, often, more fluke than art. But some who have been retweeted say there are certain flourishes that can improve the odds.

The surest path is echoing Mr. Trump’s voice. The user @fiiibuster, whose profile boasts that he has been retweeted twice by the president, has built a following of more than 38,000 accounts — and won the digital stamp of approval from a man with 66 million — through a steady offering of posts that resemble Mr. Trump’s own. Among the words in @fiiibuster’s retweeted messages: “security,” “prosperity,” “America first,” “Pathetic,” “bad reporter,” “shame!”

In other cases, Mr. Trump has gravitated toward those who share his taste in reading. A few weeks ago, he retweeted Cathy Buffaloe, 70, a retired librarian in Walton County, Ga., after she quoted a Wall Street Journal column criticizing Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

When she told her husband what had happened, he asked if she had simply dreamed it. She took screenshots to show to friends and gained about 200 followers. “It isn’t often that ‘regular’ people have an opportunity to be heard concerning national issues,” Ms. Buffaloe said in an email.

J. T. Lewis, a 19-year-old Republican candidate for the Connecticut State Senate whose brother Jesse was killed in the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, was retweeted last year after writing a flattering message to Mr. Trump. When he traveled to Washington months later to meet with the president as part of a school safety event, Mr. Lewis brought a printout of the tweet.

“He smirked and signed it,” he said. “It’s in my room somewhere.”

Mr. Lewis said he hoped the president’s imprimatur would show that Mr. Trump was not in league with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has spread bogus claims about the Sandy Hook shooting, including asserting that the victims’ families were actors and part of a plot to confiscate guns. (In 2015, Mr. Trump appeared on Mr. Jones’s “Infowars” program and praised him.)

But Mr. Lewis is skeptical that getting through to Mr. Trump owes to any elaborate strategy. “I don’t think things are planned out the way we think they are from the outside,” he said. “I think that was literally just: Guy in pajamas, ‘Oh, this is a nice tweet.’”

THE WRONG IVANKA

“The fingers aren’t as good as the brain,” the president once explained, discussing the typos he makes on Twitter.

And those fingers have at times conferred a spotlight on unsuspecting tweeters with low opinions of him.

In a tweet one night in January 2017, just before his inauguration, Mr. Trump shared a message calling his daughter Ivanka “a woman with real character and class” and tagging @ivanka.

That Twitter handle belongs to Ivanka Majic, 45, a technology researcher in Brighton, England, who shares a first name and little else with the president’s daughter. Ms. Majic woke up to media inquiries and a dilemma.

“There’s a decision to be made,” she said in an interview. “If you’re going to say something, what are you going to say?”

Ms. Majic recognized she would probably never be handed a megaphone like this again. “He was a bit unlucky, really, that it was my Twitter account,” she said.

She settled on this: “You’re a man with great responsibilities. May I suggest more care on Twitter and more time learning about #climatechange.”

Instantly, Ms. Majic became something of a local luminary as her progressive city strained to process Mr. Trump’s victory. Days later, at the London chapter of the global Women’s March, one attendee’s sign read, “@Ivanka, loving your work!”

In the years since, Ms. Majic has celebrated an annual “Trumpiversary” to mark the occasion. But one news clipping from the time still grates.

“There was one article that said, ‘Ivanka only has 2,700 followers,’” she remembered. “I was like, ‘That’s quite good for a normal person!’”

_______

Karen Yourish and Larry Buchanan contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research. Produced by Gray Beltran and Rumsey Taylor.

🍁🏈🍂🍻🍁🏈🍂🍻🍁🏈🍂🍻🍁🏈

[richmeganews]

Vox Sentences: It’s Mueller time

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

The special counsel finishes his work; the UK extends its deadline.

The Mueller report is in

Win McNamee/Getty Images

After 22 months, 34 indictments, and weeks of breathless anticipation by reporters around the world, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia is concluded. He has submitted a report to Attorney General Bill Barr. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

But the big question remains: What does the report say? WHAT DOES THE REPORT SAY?!? Barr says he might be ready to tell Congress as soon as this weekend. [Read Barr’s letter]

The report could be a dry law enforcement document or an authoritative narrative of everything we know about the case. Either way, it has two big questions to answer: Did the Trump campaign collude with Russia, and did Trump obstruct justice to try to block the inquiry? [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

Barr can make parts of the report public, or all of it. He’s said his goal is to be as transparent as possible — something the House of Representatives (and the 2020 Democratic candidates, and many other people) want too. [BuzzFeed / Zoe Tillman]

Just because we haven’t seen the report, though, doesn’t mean that we have no idea what the investigation has found. The arrests and indictments, and reporting on the investigation itself, have revealed details of Russian social media manipulation, contacts between the Trump campaign and foreign nationals, and much more. [NYT / Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish]

Here’s what we know so far. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

Mark your Brexit calendars for April 12

The European Union has granted the United Kingdom a short delay on Brexit negotiations, until at least April 12. Chaos has been avoided ... for now. [Vox / Jen Kirby]

The March 29 deadline will be extended until May 22 if UK Prime Minister Theresa May can get Parliament to accept in the coming weeks. But she has signaled she’s not sure whether she’ll bring the deal back to Parliament. [Reuters]

Parliament has already rejected May’s deal twice — and if it gets rejected a third time, the worst-case scenario happens: the UK will crash out of the European Union on April 12 without a deal. [NYT / Stephen Castle and Steven Erlanger]

The EU has said it’s open to a much longer extension — but with conditions. The UK needs to come up with an entirely new Brexit approach before April 12, and the country will have to host European parliamentary elections in May. [Politico Europe / Charlie Cooper]

This is all getting really expensive. Even though Brexit hasn’t happened yet, the economic loss to the UK is about $1 billion per week. Growth in the UK is now less than 1 percent. The future of trade with Europe is still unclear, as is the fate of EU workers who are employed in the UK. [CNN / Ivana Kottasová]

Miscellaneous

Teachers in Indiana say they were mock-executed with pellets in a school shooting drill. Officers reportedly did not warn teachers that training weapons would be part of the exercise. [New York magazine / Sarah Jones]

Chicago’s Puerto Rican community is one of the largest and most organized in America. 6.8 percent of Peurto Ricans in the area are unemployed, and the struggles they face reflect a deeper history of racial segregation in US cities. [Center for Investigative Journalism / Justin Agrelo, Katie Rice, Martha Bayne, and Kari Lydersen]

President Trump announced he would withdraw sanctions on North Korea on Friday, just one day after the White House called for the measures. The policy switch comes about one month after denuclearization talks between Trump and Kim Jong Un fell apart because of different perspectives on sanctions. [Politico / Caitlin Oprysko]

Experience, age, gender or racial identity: It’s harder than ever to tell what characteristics in candidates are really important to voters — especially when those demands can change over the course of a campaign. [FiveThirtyEight / Nathaniel Rakich]

Who is ... Robert Mueller? Many Americans mythologize the special counsel who has run a deep background investigation into the 2016 elections. [Atlantic / Megan Garber]

Verbatim

“We would like to acknowledge and condemn the fact that this threat was racially charged. The entire staff and School Board stand in solidarity with our students of color.” [Charlottesville City Schools in a letter to parents on Friday after a 17-year-old threatened a racist attack on school property]

Watch this: How the British failed India and Pakistan

The two nations were born at war — which can be traced back to this British strategy. [YouTube / Danush Parvaneh and Ranjani Chakraborty]

Read more

“Remain in Mexico”: Trump’s quietly expanding crackdown on asylum seekers, explained

An “unprecedented” flood season lies ahead this spring, according to NOAA

Nikki Haley is wrong: Finland takes care of new moms way better than the US

Inside the fight to make the European Parliament take sexual harassment seriously

The new, confusing Zika travel advice, explained

The post Vox Sentences: It’s Mueller time appeared first on .

The post Vox Sentences: It’s Mueller time appeared first on .

from WordPress http://www.richmeganews.com/vox-sentences-its-mueller-time/

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/whats-republicans-health-plan-pre-existing-conditions/

What's in Republicans health plan on pre-existing conditions?

If you were hoping that Obamacare, or at least the best of the American Care Act (ACA), would stay in place, you don't have a reason to panic right now. Yes, the Republicans in Congress pass their third and latest attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare, but it now has to go to the Senate where it will likely whither on the vine. Just because it passed in the house doesn't mean that Obamacare is over. If you're happy with your insurance right now, it's safe while the bill gets kicked around in the Senate. It was a tight vote of 217-213 on Thursday. President Donald Trump had a real nail biter, but he was very vocal that he wanted/needed a big win to celebrate in the Rose Garden which he promptly did after learning the results. There were 20 Republican representatives who voted against the act, and hopefully, the voters in their districts will remember this next year when they're campaigning. The Republican push to replace the Affordable Care Act was revived this week in Congress by a small change to their plan designed to combat concerns over coverage for those with pre-existing health problems. The change helped get the bill through the House of Representatives in a tight vote Thursday, but experts say it may make little difference in the hunt for affordable coverage for these patients. The bill proposes setting aside an additional $8 billion over five years to help states cover those who may be subject to higher insurance rates because they've had a lapse in coverage. That's on top of about $100 billion over a decade for states to help people afford coverage and stabilize insurance markets. The problem, experts say, is that the money is unlikely to guarantee an affordable alternative for those who get coverage under a popular provision of the Affordable Care Act that prevents insurers from rejecting people or charging higher rates based on their health. "Many people with pre-existing conditions will have a hard time maintaining coverage because it just won't be affordable," said Larry Levitt, a health insurance expert with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health care issues. The ultimate impact on those with pre-existing conditions remains unknown. The bill now heads for the Senate, where it is expected to change, and the plan leaves many important coverage decisions up to the states. Still, it is making some who are now covered by the Affordable Care Act nervous. John S. Williams, an attorney in New Orleans whose multiple sclerosis medication costs $70,000 a year, buys insurance through the Affordable Care Act's marketplace. Without protections for pre-existing conditions he fears he would have to close his law practice and find a job with that offers a group insurance plan. "We always hear about job growth and business creation - being able to have affordable health care drives that," Williams said. "I have tremendous satisfaction with owning a business, but I know that if I can't get coverage, I would be forced to get a different job. I can't not have coverage for my multiple sclerosis." Here's how coverage may change for those with pre-existing conditions under the plan: WHAT CHANGES? States will be able to get federal waivers allowing insurers to charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing illnesses who have let their coverage lapse. States can then use federal money to fund government-operated insurance programs for expensive patients called "high-risk pools." HOW DO THESE POOLS OPERATE? Patients who couldn't get or afford insurance could apply for coverage through these high risk pools, which existed before the Affordable Care Act was passed. Even though they were charged far higher rates, up to double the amount paid by consumers with no serious ailments, care for these patients is so expensive that government money was needed to fund the programs. DO THEY WORK? In the more than 30 states that had high-risk pools, net losses piled up to more than $1.2 billion in 2011, the high point of the pools before the Affordable Care Act took full effect. Medical expenses outpaced premiums collected, and losses averaged $5,500 per person enrolled. States used fees and taxes to make up the difference, and states sometimes made it more difficult to some to qualify for care. IS THE FEDERAL MONEY ENOUGH? An analysis by the health care consulting firm Avalere found that the money would only be enough to fund high-risk pools in a few small states. High-risk pools could fill up fast with patients who have a lapse in coverage. People with pre-existing conditions could lose their insurance if they can no longer work due to their health. The Republican health plan also is expected to raise premiums for older people, who are more likely to have a pre-existing condition. "This gets complicated fast," Avalere President Dan Mendelson said. About 2.2 million people in the individual insurance market have some sort of pre-existing chronic condition, according to Avalere. WHAT MIGHT THIS MEAN FOR PATIENTS? Because the bill is expected to change, and because it leaves big decisions up to the states, it's hard to say now what it would mean. Also, federal auditors have not had time to analyze the plan. Proponents of the bill note that people in poor health would still be protected as long as they maintain coverage. If they don't, the higher premiums they are charged would revert back to standard rates after 12 months, assuming the customer could afford to keep paying. In the past, risk pools have not guaranteed coverage. States have established waiting lists to get into their risk pools or restricted admission to the pools, since they ultimately have to balance their budget and they have no way to predict how high costs will climb. "There is no guarantee in the law that people with pre-existing conditions would get access to affordable coverage," said Kaiser's Levitt. Adrienne Standley, the operations director at a start-up apparel business in Philadelphia, is not waiting to find out. Her plan through the Affordable Care Act covers treatment for her asthma and attention deficit disorder, but she's afraid the Republican plan will mean she can no longer afford doctor's visits and medication. "I'm looking at stockpiling, making sure I have an inhaler," she said. "I'm pretty scared to lose coverage." So just who did vote for this latest version? Here's the list broken down by state and district for you voters wanting to make a decision early for their re-election campaign. AL-1 Bradley Byrne AL-2 Martha Roby AL-3 Mike D. Rogers AL-4 Robert B. Aderholt AL-5 Mo Brooks AL-6 Gary Palmer AR-2 French Hill AR-3 Steve Womack AR-4 Bruce Westerman AZ-2 Martha E. McSally AZ-4 Paul Gosar AZ-6 David Schweikert AZ-8 Trent Franks CA-4 Tom McClintock CA-22 Devin Nunes CA-23 Kevin McCarthy CA-45 Mimi Walters CA-48 Dana Rohrabacher CA-50 Duncan Hunter CO-4 Ken Buck FL-1 Matt Gaetz FL-3 Ted Yoho FL-4 John Rutherford FL-11 Daniel Webster FL-12 Gus Bilirakis FL-15 Dennis A. Ross FL-16 Vern Buchanan FL-17 Tom Rooney FL-18 Brian Mast FL-19 Francis Rooney GA-1 Earl L. "Buddy" Carter GA-3Drew Ferguson GA-7Rob Woodall GA-9Doug Collins GA-10Jody B. Hice GA-11Barry Loudermilk GA-12Rick W. Allen GA-14Tom Graves IA-4Steve King IL-13Rodney Davis IL-15John Shimkus IL-18Darin M. LaHood IN-2Jackie Walorski IN-3Jim Banks IN-4Todd Rokita IN-6Luke Messer IN-8Larry Bucshon KS-1Roger Marshall KS-2Lynn Jenkins KS-4Ron Estes KY-1James Comer KY-2Brett Guthrie KY-6Andy Barr LA-1Steve Scalise LA-3Clay Higgins LA-5Ralph Abraham MD-1Andy Harris MI-1Jack Bergman MI-2Bill Huizenga MI-4John Moolenaar MI-6Fred Upton MI-7Tim Walberg MI-8Mike Bishop MI-10Paul Mitchell MI-11Dave Trott MN-2Jason Lewis MO-2Ann Wagner MO-3Blaine Luetkemeyer MO-4Vicky Hartzler MO-6Sam Graves MO-7Billy Long MO-8Jason Smith MS-3Gregg Harper MS-4Steven M. Palazzo NC-2George Holding NC-5Virginia Foxx NC-6Mark Walker NC-7David Rouzer NC-8Richard Hudson NC-9Robert Pittenger NC-10Patrick T. McHenry NC-11Mark Meadows NC-13Ted Budd ND-1Kevin Cramer NE-2Don Bacon NE-3Adrian Smith NJ-3Tom MacArthur NV-2Mark Amodei NY-1Lee Zeldin NY-2Peter T. King NY-19John J. Faso NY-21Elise Stefanik NY-23Tom Reed NY-27Chris Collins OH-1Steve Chabot OH-4Jim Jordan OH-5Bob Latta OH-6Bill Johnson OH-8Warren Davidson OH-12Pat Tiberi OH-15Steve Stivers OH-16James B. Renacci OK-1Jim Bridenstine OK-2Markwayne Mullin OK-3Frank D. Lucas OK-4Tom Cole OK-5Steve Russell OR-2Greg Walden PA-3Mike Kelly PA-4Scott Perry PA-5Glenn Thompson PA-9Bill Shuster PA-10Tom Marino PA-11Lou Barletta PA-16Lloyd K. Smucker PA-18Tim Murphy SC-1Mark Sanford SC-2Joe Wilson SC-4Trey Gowdy SC-7Tom Rice SD-1Kristi Noem TN-1Phil Roe TN-2John J. Duncan Jr. TN-3Chuck Fleischmann TN-4Scott DesJarlais TN-6Diane Black TN-7Marsha Blackburn TN-8David Kustoff TX-1Louie Gohmert TX-2Ted Poe TX-3Sam Johnson TX-4John Ratcliffe TX-5Jeb Hensarling TX-6Joe L. Barton TX-7John Culberson TX-8Kevin Brady TX-10Michael McCaul TX-11K. Michael Conaway TX-12Kay Granger TX-13Mac Thornberry TX-14Randy Weber TX-17Bill Flores TX-19Jodey Arrington TX-21Lamar Smith TX-22Pete Olson TX-24Kenny Marchant TX-25Roger Williams TX-26Michael C. Burgess TX-27Blake Farenthold TX-31John Carter TX-32Pete Sessions TX-36Brian Babin UT-1Rob Bishop UT-2Chris Stewart UT-3Jason Chaffetz UT-4Mia Love VA-1Rob Wittman VA-2Scott Taylor VA-5Tom Garrett VA-6Robert W. Goodlatte VA-7Dave Brat VA-9Morgan Griffith WA-4Dan Newhouse WA-5Cathy McMorris Rodgers WI-1Paul D. Ryan WI-5Jim Sensenbrenner WI-6Glenn Grothman WI-7Sean P. Duffy WY-1Liz Cheney

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

[mst3kproject]

Mars Needs Women

This is one of the B-movies that a lot of people have heard of, although I’m not sure how many have actually seen it.  It was written, produced, and directed by Larry “They Just Didn’t Care” Buchanan and stars Tommy Kirk from Catalina Caper and Village of the Giants.  Happy belated birthday to Mr. Kirk, who just turned seventy-nine in December of 2020.  That’s not a bad score for a guy who’s done as many drugs as he has.

The planet Mars is suffering from a genetic problem – their chromosomes are so degraded that one hundred males are born for every one female!  Clearly this is not conducive to the survival of the species, so a group of Martians have come to Earth seeking another solution: they want five female volunteers to return to Mars with them and find out if our genes are compatible!  The army brass (all male, obviously) dismiss the idea out of hand, but the Martians cannot afford to fail.  They will have their way with the Earth Women, with or without the Earth Men’s permission.

We all know that Larry Buchanan couldn’t come up with an idea of his own, so naturally this is a remake of sorts.  Mars Needs Women was inspired by Tommy Kirk’s previous movie Pajama Party, which doesn’t sound like an alien invasion flick, but is.  In it, Kirk plays a Martian named Gogo (yes, really), who comes to Earth as an invasion scout but decides not to take over the planet because he falls in love with Annette Funicello.  Mars Needs Women dispenses with the teen hijinks angle in an attempt to be a straight-up sci-fi thriller, and fails miserably.

We get the normal Larry Buchanan types of suck, such as crummy lighting, appallingly awful day-for-night, a washed-out, colourless print, and copious stock footage.  There’s a long bit where the air force tries to attack the Martian ship and fails, which is entirely stock footage intercut with men in uniforms staring at something next to the camera.  We don’t see the flying saucer itself even once during this sequence, although they do have a model of it that shows up elsewhere and is almost definitely the best effect in the whole movie.  Not a high bar, of course, but seeing as they actually appear to have spent money on this miniature, you’d think it’d get more screen time.

The Martians themselves dress like a sort of noir version of the Chicken Men of Krankor.  Their costumes are black wetsuits decorated with duct tape and silver paint, with stupid antennae on the sides of their heads.  It amuses me that the first thing they do after acquiring some ‘Earth apparel’ is complain about how dumb neckties are.  There’s a mention about how they’ve been trained in ‘Earth slang’, which seems to have happened just so the movie would have no possible sources of humour.  When I think about Attack of the The Eye Creatures, I’m kind of grateful that Mars Needs Women never tries to be funny, but it leaves the whole film relentlessly monotone.

The acting is pretty crummy, even from the main characters.  Yvonne Craig (Batgirl – no, not one of them, the actual Batgirl) does her best with the material but the lines she’s given are such technobabble bullshit there are very few people who could deliver them with any conviction.  Almost everybody else is bland at best.  The women scream and faint, and the military guys tense their jaws and glare.  The only decent acting moment actually goes to Tommy Kirk as he describes the conditions on Mars, the dying planet.  His tone barely changes, and yet you can sense his nostalgia and regret.

Do I even need to ask if this movie objectifies women?  Well, yes, actually, I do, and you’ll see why in a minute.  The answer is a resounding yes and a good bit of run time is spent doing exactly that.  Before the opening credits we see three blondes abducted in broad daylight, dematerialized by the simple means of stopping the camera, removing the actress, and starting it up again. One of these hapless victims is taken from the shower.  We later learn that the beam-ups failed somehow, which I assume means the women died, but that’s apparently not worth more than a throwaway line.

Once the five Martians arrive on Earth, they disperse to go hunting for suitable subjects.  The first one goes directly to a strip bar, perhaps on the assumption that the employees will not be married (he’d be amazed).  We then watch the stripper dance at great length, cutting back to it repeatedly in between other threads of the storyline, which suggests that the Martian sat there for hours staring at her before making his move.  He seems to have been the least choosy of the five, simply taking the first woman he gets a boner for.  The others are a bit more discerning.

None more so than the leader, Fellow One (the Martians are Fellows One through Five, which did save the writers from having to come up with ‘alien names’ that sound like synthetic fabrics).  He decides on Craig’s character, Dr. Marjorie Bolen, an expert in ‘space medicine’ and ‘space genetics’ (this may be 60’s for astrobiology).  Her skills seem to be just what the Martians need.  This character is treated terribly by the movie and almost everybody in it. A news reporter commenting on Dr. Bolen’s arrival describes her as a stunning brunette who found it hard to hide her charm behind her horn-rimmed spectacles, and only then moves on to her qualifications.  She gives a news conference titled Sex and Outer Space, and the reporters who are supposed to be interviewing her have a laugh about the good time the kidnapped women will supposedly be having on Mars.  The prop department can’t even bother to spell her name right – it’s written as ‘Majorie’ on a sign even though the r is clearly audible when people say it out loud.

In contrast to this, Fellow One treats her with some degree of respect.  Their conversations about science are mostly nonsense, but you can tell what the script is going for.  They go on a couple of quick dates, one to a planetarium and one to a museum exhibit on human reproduction (yes, this is weird and icky), and while it is rushed, their little love story is actually important to the plot in ways besides Fellow One deciding to abandon the mission so he can bone her.  The movie considers Dr. Bolen a sex object, but from the beginning Fellow One sees her as more than that.

This brings us, in a sideways kind of way, to the thing I find weirdly fascinating about Mars Needs Women: the alien invaders are curiously considerate.  They steal a car, but they take one from airport parking on the assumption that the owner won’t need it for a while.  They request unattached women, not wanting to break up any happy partnerships. And most of all, they ask for volunteers for abduction!  This makes me wonder what would have happened if they’d broadcast their message to the entire world instead of one group of soldiers.  Humans being the way we are, I’m sure there’re lots of people out there who’d fuck a couple of aliens if it meant a free trip to Mars (or move to Mars if it meant they got to fuck some aliens).

The female characters even seem designed to want a trip to space.  Dr. Bolen might well have helped them willingly in exchange for this unparalleled chance to expand her research, and she does find it very sexy that Fellow One speaks to her as an equal.  Yet somehow, the idea never even comes up.  At the last minute, she becomes the helpless princess who must be saved from peril, and Fellow One simply tells her he loves her and asks her to flee.  Why not invite her along as a guest instead of a captive? It’s got to be worth a try.

The others can be made to fit this pattern, too. The stripper?  Maybe she’s sick of being gawked at like meat and would welcome the chance to be among people who will treat her like a queen.  The flight attendant?  She might feel like she’s been everywhere and seen everything – on Earth, at least.  The artist? A whole new planet to inspire her! The homecoming queen?  She’s a journalism major.  What a scoop if she can report back to Earth about the culture and history of Mars!  I want to see a remake of this movie in which the ladies really are volunteers, who must help the Martians outwit the military so they can start their new lives on another planet.

Sadly, this is not that movie, and its exploitative aspects stand rather awkwardly alongside the embryonic feminism embodied in Dr. Bolen, overwhelming it more often than not.  I do want to give it maybe half a kudo, though, for at least acknowledging that women can have interests and ambitions.  I guess the point of the ending is that Fellow One has realized they need to be allowed to pursue those instead of being forced to breed.

Mars Needs Women is probably Larry Buchanan’s best movie, which is a statement on the same level as saying that The Beast of Yucca Flats is Coleman Francis’ – by any reasonable standard it still really sucks.  While it has many problems, I would say that the one that kills any entertainment value is how the narrative totally lacks the urgency the title implies.  The ending should be a race to stop the Martians taking off with their prisoners, but no, it saunters instead.  If there were only some tension in the film, it could have been the guilty pleasure you’d want from a movie called Mars Needs Women.

[mst3kproject]

Curse of the Swamp Creature

 Zontar, the Thing from Venus looks like it ought to be perfect fodder for this blog – it was, after all, directed by Larry Buchanan of Attack of the The Eye Creatures, and stars John Agar. I decided early on, however, that I would not use it because it was a remake of It Conquered the World, which MST3K already tackled.  But fear not, MSTies, Zontar isn’t the only film these two bad movie titans made together!  I give you Curse of the Swamp Creature, which disappointingly has only one the in the title.

Geologist Barry Rogers arrives in some fly-bitten middle of nowhere to meet a man named Driscoll West, with whom he plans to look for oil.  Instead, he finds a woman claiming to be Mrs. West and a couple of her employees – she tells Rogers that her husband had something else come up, but that she’s fully capable of helping him with his prospecting.  The party ventures into a swamp that looks like a perfect home for either the Giant Leeches or the Boggy Creek Creature, but find neither. Instead, they meet Dr. Simon Trent, a mad scientist who keeps his wife locked in a closet and stock alligator footage in his backyard pool.  He’s planning to conquer the world with indestructible fish people, and he thinks Mrs. West is the perfect subject for his experiments!

Wait… this sounds weirdly familiar.  Mad scientist with a captive wife making monsters, who eventually decides a female criminal is just what he needs?  Is… is this a remake of Voodoo Woman?  Why the hell would anybody remake Voodoo Woman?! Especially when Voodoo Woman was itself just a (*ahem*) 're-imagining' of The She-Creature, which Buchanan himself already re-made as Creature of Destruction!  Not to mention that The She-Creature was just a cash-in on In Search of Bridey Murphy with a monster added to differentiate it from The Undead, and…

Hold on, I think I need a flow chart here.  Gimme a minute.

Clear now?

The idea of this being a remake of Voodoo Woman actually makes sense of a couple of weird subplots that have no other reason to exist.  I have complained in the past that some of these movies seem to be put together by people who know that a film should have certain things in it, but don’t understand how those components come together into a story.  Curse of the Swamp Creature is a particularly illuminating example.  Almost everything that was in Voodoo Woman is also in this movie, but in many places, Buchanan has failed to understand the role these ideas play in the plot.

In Voodoo Woman, Marylin and her cronies were pretending to be Ted’s contacts because they believed they were going to find the gold that supposedly belonged to the tribe, and her story culminates in learning that no such treasure exists.  Her greed and violence are also what brings her to Dr. Gerhart’s attention as a possible subject, since he wants his creature to be capable of killing.  In Curse of the Swamp Creature, ‘Mrs. West’ is likewise an imposter, who murdered Mr. West and dumped his body in the swamp so that Rogers would lead her to the oil.  This has nothing to do with anything else in the story.  To be an equivalent of the gold from Voodoo Woman, the oil would have to be something located near or belonging to Dr. Trent.  Instead, it just falls out of the story, and it’s not anything Mrs. West says or does that makes the doctor choose her.  She seems to be selected at random.

There’s also a thing in which one of the prospectors witnesses a ‘snake dance’ performed by the world’s most unenthusiastic voodoo cult, and follows the dancer home intending to rape her.  She tricks him into drowning in quicksand and then we return to the main plot as if nothing happened.  In Voodoo Woman, the attack on Zuranda was the first time the growing racial tensions in the film erupted into actual violence, when the local people decided they could no longer tolerate the presence of Dr. Gerhart. The equivalent scene in Curse of the Swamp Creature does nothing except pay off the quicksand people have been talking about for the entire movie, in an entirely unsatisfying way.

Curse of the Swamp Creature’s equivalent to the native village from Voodoo Woman is a population of poor black people living in small houses and trailers in the swamp.  In Voodoo Woman Dr. Gerhart needed a relationship with the locals, because he was trying to incorporate their magic into his work.  Dr. Trent, meanwhile, sees them only as a convenient victim pool.  They try to place some kind of curse on him and maybe the ending plays out the way it does because of that, but then, maybe it doesn’t – we don’t see anything in the movie that suggests they have any real magical powers.  The only reason the ceremony seems to be in the movie is to justify the attempted rape… and that was only in the movie because it was in Voodoo Woman, so the whole thing is useless.  The constant ‘voodoo drumming’ throughout the film gets really obnoxious, too.

I guess I should at least give Curse of the Swamp Creature points for not trying to pretend it’s set in Africa.  On the other hand, the humid swamp they’re shooting it looks a whole hell of a lot more like Africa than anything in The Leech Woman, so they probably could have gotten away with it.  I don’t know about you guys but I sure can’t tell the difference between crocodiles and alligators.

At the end of Curse of the Swamp Creature you can kind of tell what they’re going for but they were so busy copying scenes from Voodoo Woman that they didn’t bother to set up any of the things that would have made it meaningful.  Dr. Trent successfully transforms Mrs. West into a monster and, as her master, orders her to kill.  Trent’s wife Pat, however, begs her not to listen to him.  The two of them yell at her for a minute and then Mrs. West throws Trent into the alligator pool.  She jumps in after him because I guess that’s better than living out her life as a swamp monster.

Several things would have been necessary to make this work.  First of all, we would have needed to see one of Dr. Trent’s previous creations obey him and kill somebody.  We saw one walk across the room when he told it to, but that’s not exactly the same thing… we would need a demonstration that Trent’s control is able to overrule the victim’s personality.  Second, we would need to see some kind of bond form between Pat and Mrs. West, so that Pat would have a reason to believe the monster would listen to her.  In fact, the two characters barely speak to each other.  Finally, one of the things Pat calls out is, “look at yourself, you used to be beautiful!” If this were going to be a factor in Mrs. West’s suicide, we really ought to have seen some earlier evidence of vanity.

In sum total, the plot of this movie is an irreparable mess. Larry Buchanan and his collaborators had obviously seen Voodoo Woman but they didn’t understand any of the levels on which that movie worked – and compared to Curse of the Swamp Creature, it actually worked very well.

On top of that, Curse of the Swamp Creature is so hopelessly cheap that it’s alternately hilarious and depressing.  It’s filmed it somebody’s suburban house, standing in for a secret laboratory deep in the swamp.  The lab equipment in Trent’s basement appears to have been scrounged from half a dozen garage sales.  And when I mentioned him having stock alligator footage in his pool… it’s literally a chlorinated swimming pool in a greenhouse-looking structure, intercut with stock footage of alligators doing their thing in a muddy pond.  Trent stands on the diving board when tossing his failed experiments in for them to eat.  I can’t tell if we’re supposed to pretend it’s something else, or if Trent is literally keeping gators in his backyard pool!

Now I guess it’s time to talk about John Agar. Fortunately, it won’t take long because he never does anything.  I’m getting really fed up with movies whose designated heroes never do anything.  I don’t remember exactly what, if anything, Touch Connors did in Voodoo Woman, but that was a movie in which the villains, Dr. Gerhart and Marylin, were interesting enough that you didn’t notice. In Curse of the Swamp Creature, John Agar is dull and Dr. Trent and Mrs. West are duller.  He shows up wearing a pair of cat-eye sunglasses right out of Crow’s collection in Danger!! Death Ray, and spends the whole movie squinting at things.

If Curse of the Swamp Creature has anything to prove, I think it’s proving that no matter how bad something was, Larry Buchanan could always make it worse.  Voodoo Woman was a crummy rehash of The She-Creature but managed to be worth watching by making some points about colonialism… even if those were still probably accidental.  Curse of the Swamp Creature is a crummy rehash of a crummy rehash, stripping its source material for whatever coherence and meaning it might have originally possessed.  God, imagine if Buchanan had tried to remake something that was already completely incoherent… like Blood Feast or Robot Monster.  I shudder to think.

[mst3kproject]

It’s Alive!

This movie has Tommy Kirk and several alumni of Attack of the The Eye Creatures, including director Larry Buchanan.  Watching it will either kill me or make me invincible.  Only one way to find out which.

Norm and Leyla Sterns are on a boring-ass road trip through the Ozark plateau, looking for the Real America or something. They detour to see some fiberglass dinosaurs and then realize they’re almost out of gas, but helpful stranger Wayne Thomas directs them to a nearby farmhouse that might have some they could borrow.  This place turns out to belong to a reptile-obsessed guy named Greeley and his abused housekeeper Bella.  They don’t have any gas but the delivery truck should be along soon, so Greeley insists that the Sternses stick around and see his menagerie of creepy-crawlies. It’s pretty obvious (even to Leyla) that he’s going to kill them, along with Wayne when the latter shows up to look for them, but I doubt anybody expected he would try to feed them to the suspiciously humanoid dinosaur that lives in a Styrofoam cave under his house.

Holy shit, is this movie ever bad.  For starters, I have no idea whether it’s supposed to be taking place during the day or at night.  In Attack of the The Eye Creatures we had people telling us it was dark out, so we knew that we were looking at shitty day-for-night instead of just shitty photography in general. In It’s Alive! we’ve got exactly the same bright sunshine through a dark filter lighting whether we’re inside, outside, down in a cave, high noon or the middle of the night.  Worse, all these poorly-lit shots are set up so that it’s almost impossible to tell where people (and monsters) are in relation to one another.  We never get a sense of the spaces we’re in, or which ones are dangerous and which safe.

The actors are impossibly bad, every single one of them.  They all try, but they all fail – whether it’s Bella weeping for fear, Leyla shouting at her husband, Greeley cackling evilly as he threatens them with a gun, or Norm calling for help as the monster closes in.  You never believe a moment of it.  At best you’re laughing.  At worst you’re squirming with secondhand embarrassment.  This is especially fatal to the inevitable love story, which was doomed from the start because Wayne and Leyla are hitting it off mere hours after Norm was eaten by the creature.  The married couple were arguing just before it happened, true, but you’d think Leyla could spare a little time to grieve for somebody she once loved, rather than making jokes about how love will last with a paleontologist, because the older you are the more interested he is.

The pacing is weird.  The first bit of the movie, with the Sternses looking for gas and falling into Greeley’s trap, Leyla wanting to leave and Norm telling her not to worry, is not too slow and feels like its going somewhere.  It tends to remind the MSTie of Manos: the Hands of Fate, except that It’s Alive! has fewer awkward pauses and less repetition (now there’s some faint praise for you). Things bog down a little once the protagonists are trapped in the cave, but eventually Bella arrives with her offer to help Leyla and Wayne escape if they’ll take her with them… and the movie veers off into a long-ass, no-dialogue flashback about how Bella ended up working for Greeley.  This features lots of dreamy music and slow-motion running, and feels like part of an earlier daft just got randomly sewn into the film we’re watching in order to extend the running time.

If that seems oddly specific it’s because I’m around eighty-five percent sure that’s what happened.

And of course there’s the monster itself.  In the halls of the St. Phibes Institute for B-Movie Monsters, it’s a legend, right up there with ridiculous specimens like the Giant Claw and the Creeping Terror.  It looks kind of like a catfish costume made by a junior high drama club who didn’t have the money to buy any supplies that weren’t already in the art classroom. It’s got bulging eyes and teeth that stick out at odd angles, and I think it’s supposed to be significantly bigger than a human but it’s obviously not.  It’s hilariously awful, and the most amazing thing about it is that Larry Buchanan actually recycled it – it originally appeared in his previous film Creature of Destruction (which was a re-make of The She-Creature, of all fucking things).  There was so little money for this production that they had to re-use bits of previous under-funded productions.

It’s too bad the monster is only in at best a minute and a half of footage, because the only real entertainment to be had here is laughing at it.  It’s even worse that it never appears in the same shot as any of the characters except in one particularly awful matte, because seeing this thing strangle people and then pretend to chow down would have been bad movie diamonds.  It is pretty funny when Wayne tries to explain that it’s a mosasaur (a mosasaur - @palaeofail is crying right now and doesn’t know why) that somehow survived millions of years in the cave in suspended animation.  Sometimes ‘it’s a cave, caves have monsters in them’ really is all the explanation you need.  It worked for The Black Scorpion.

The slogan of Attack of the The Eye Creatures seems to have been we just don’t care, but I get the impression that a few people cared a little about It’s Alive!, because the movie does attempt to say a couple of things. First, it’s a film about the lost joy of the Road Trip.  Leyla Sterns grew up in New York and wants to see the real America, which she imagines as a rural idyll of small towns and roadside attractions.  Greeley has a similar view of his own life: he ran a little zoo called the ‘Serpentorium’, where people would stop to see his snakes and lizards, as well as a few more exotic animals such as a lynx and a monkey, and to get a tour of the caves. Once the new highway came along, his visitors dried up, and he devolved into a misanthropic asshole.  One of the little joys of travelling, along with the livelihoods earned from it, has been sacrificed at the altar of efficiency. Grist for the wheels of progress, if you will.

On a less-explicit level, It’s Alive! is also a film about the nature of monstrosity. The creature in the caves is a monster – it’s loud and ugly and it has big teeth, and it eats people for dinner. Nobody could argue that’s not a monster, right?  Maybe so, but what about Greeley himself?  He kidnaps and tortures travelers to either keep them as slaves, as he did with Bella, or feed them to his creature, as he plans for Norm, Leyla, and Wayne.  People who torture and murder strangers in real life are often described as monsters, and unlike the thing in the cave, Greeley is aware of the moral dimension of what he does.

The creature, after all, is an animal.  It’s just doing what it does, feeding, protecting its territory, and defending itself.  Greeley is a human being.  He, too, must eat, protect what is his, and defend himself, but he consciously chooses to do these things in a way that harms others.  If he wanted a housekeeper he could have hired one, but he chose to force Bella into that role instead.  When he learned that the creature preferred humans to the animal carcasses he brought it, he could have refused to indulge it, but he didn’t.  The fact that he makes excuses for the things he does only reinforces that he knows he is in the wrong.

Can we not therefore argue that it’s Greeley who is the monster in this monster movie?  I honestly think this is a point the film-makers were trying to make, because we see way more of Greeley’s evil than we do of what the creature’s doing. Bella’s over-long flashback never shows us the creature once.  Instead it’s all about how Greeley captured and broke her.  The creature is just one of several tools he uses to express his hatred of the human race.

Another kind-of-interesting thing in It’s Alive! is the question of who’s story it is. Our audience identification characters are Norm, Leyla, and Wayne, but they’ve wandered into a story that was already happening.  The real protagonist is Bella.  Her flashback shows us her capture and how she tried to escape but couldn’t – now Greeley is getting tired of her and may replace her with the younger, prettier Leyla, and so she acts to save not only her fellow prisoners but herself.  For years now that only thing that’s kept her going is fear of death, which she eventually overcomes to have her revenge on Greeley and his creature at the cost of her own life.  She dies at the end, but she wins, because she dies knowing that she's accomplished her goal.  I’m pretty sure this was intentional, too, because Bella being the hero of this story is the best explanation for why her flashback was so damned long.

It’s cool that there’s some actual stuff to think about here, but the poor execution means It’s Alive! is still not enjoyable on any level but a b-movie bullshit one.  Even then, it’s hard to watch, because everything in it looks and sounds so terrible – the lighting, the monster, the actors, everything. It’s not boring, but not particularly exciting, either.  It’s just… bad.

[bountyofbeads]

In Trump’s Twitter Feed: Conspiracy-Mongers, Racists and Spies https://nyti.ms/339gT0p

🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈

PART 2 OF 2 (CONTINUED FROM THE PREVIOUS POST)

In Trump’s Twitter Feed: Conspiracy-Mongers, Racists and Spies

By MIKE McINTIRE, KAREN YOURISH and LARRY BUCHANAN | Published November 2, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 2, 2019 |

In September, an obscure Twitter account promoting a fringe belief about an anti-Trump cabal within the government tweeted out a hashtag: #FakeWhistleblower.

It was typical for the anonymous account, which traffics in far-right content and a conspiracy theory known as QAnon, some of whose adherents think that satanic pedophiles control the “deep state.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently labeled QAnon a potential domestic terror threat.

Still, that did not stop others, including a Republican congressional candidate, from quickly picking up the hashtag and tweeting it. Within a week, hundreds of QAnon believers and “MAGA” activists had joined in, posting memes and bogus reports to undermine the complaint by a government  whistle-blower that President Trump had pressed Ukraine’s leader for dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.

Then Mr. Trump tweeted the hashtag himself.

Such is the frenetic life cycle of conspiracy-driven propaganda, fakery and hate in the age of the first Twitter presidency. Mr. Trump, whose own tweets have warned of deep-state plots against him, accused the House speaker of treason and labeled Republican critics “human scum,” has helped spread a culture of suspicion and distrust of facts into the political mainstream.

The president is also awash in an often toxic torrent that sluices into his Twitter account — roughly 1,000 tweets per minute, many intended for his eyes. Tweets that tag his handle, @realDonaldTrump, can be found with hashtags like #HitlerDidNothingWrong, #IslamIsSatanism and #WhiteGenocide. While filters can block offensive material, the president clearly sees some of it, because he dips into the frothing currents and serves up noxious bits to the rest of the world.

By retweeting suspect accounts, seemingly without regard for their identity or motives, he has lent credibility to white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots and obscure QAnon adherents like VB Nationalist, an anonymous account that has promoted a hoax about top Democrats worshiping the Devil and engaging in child sex trafficking.

“I’ve been retweeted by the President of the United States, President Trump!” replied VB Nationalist, who gained thousands of followers after the high-level boost and took it as a sign of encouragement, adding, “Tell me again, how he doesn’t care about us.”

To assess this unprecedented moment, The New York Times examined Mr. Trump’s interactions with Twitter since he took office, reviewing each of his more than 11,000 tweets and the hundreds of accounts he has retweeted, tracking the ways he is exposed to information and replicating what he is likely to see on the platform. The result, including new data analysis and previously unreported details, offers the most comprehensive view yet of a virtual world in which the president spends significant time mingling with extremists, impostors and spies.

Fake accounts tied to intelligence services in China, Iran and Russia had directed thousands of tweets at Mr. Trump, according to a Times analysis of propaganda accounts suspended by Twitter. Iranian operatives tweeted anti-Semitic tropes, saying that Mr. Trump was “being controlled” by global Zionists, and that pulling out of the Iran nuclear treaty would benefit North Korea. Russian accounts tagged the president more than 30,000 times, including in supportive tweets about the Mexican border wall and his hectoring of black football players. Mr. Trump even retweeted a phony Russian account that said, “We love you, Mr. President!”

In fact, Mr. Trump has retweeted at least 145 unverified accounts that have pushed conspiracy or fringe content, including more than two dozen that have since been suspended by Twitter. Tinfoil-hat types and racists celebrate when Mr. Trump shares something they promote. After he tweeted his support for white farmers in South Africa, replies included “DONALD IS KING!” and “No black man can develop land.”

In July, Mr. Trump retweeted a post from an unverified account that accused Obama supporters of orchestrating protests to sabotage Mr. Trump’s presidency. The message was also retweeted by a handful of Russian-controlled troll accounts.

In all, the president has retweeted 217 accounts that have not been verified by Twitter. At least 145 of these accounts have pushed conspiracy or extremist content, including more than two dozen that have since been suspended by Twitter.

The president gets some of his questionable material on Twitter from the 47 accounts he follows that show up in his feed, a curated timeline of tweets that come mostly from his family, celebrities, Fox News hosts and Republican politicians, some of whom in turn follow Twitter accounts that promote QAnon or express anti-Islam or white nationalist views.

QAnon-related accounts have potentially migrated to the president’s iPhone courtesy of retweets by Donald Trump Jr., the Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo and the conservative commentator Eric Bolling, all of whom Mr. Trump follows. The younger Mr. Trump has also retweeted Russian intelligence operatives pushing divisive stories about immigration and voter fraud.

Trolls and fringe elements quickly figured out that the best way to reach Mr. Trump is to appeal to his ego. Last year, an anonymous account with a profile photo of the actor Kurt Russell and posts promoting QAnon tagged Mr. Trump in a tweet, declaring, “You’re the greatest President of my lifetime, Sir.” It was not really Mr. Russell, but Mr. Trump retweeted it with a “Thank you!,” helping the account add 2,900 followers that day, before Twitter eventually suspended it.

Authentic or not, the most fervent MAGA and QAnon accounts — at least 23,000 of his followers have QAnon references in their profiles — form a dependable Greek chorus that exploits the tricks of the medium to amplify the president’s message. Mr. Trump benefits from the activism of his online supporters and the platform’s algorithms, which tend to reward the most partisan content within digital communities.

But the constant exposure to the worst elements of social media poses risks. Clint Watts, a former F.B.I. agent and a cybersecurity expert who studies propaganda campaigns on social media, said the time Mr. Trump spent on Twitter “gives you an amazing opportunity to game the president.”

“You are very clearly capable of using Twitter to entice and influence this president,” he said. “You can distort the guy’s views from your house.”

Mr. Trump retweeted three videos from a British far-right figure in 2017 purportedly showing Muslims committing acts of violence. Each of the videos was either highly misleading or was posted with a false description. The account had been retweeted by Ann Coulter, whom he followed on Twitter at the time.

The president follows several Fox News commentators, who provide a constant stream of support for him and attacks against his opponents.

His mentions contain thousands of messages like these every day — a near-infinite supply of tweets attacking him, promoting extremist conspiracy theories and proclaiming support for him.

Since the dawn of the internet, the nation’s leaders have been largely sheltered from the storm of disinformation and bile that churns on its fringes. Social media barely existed during Bill Clinton’s presidency, George W. Bush’s reference to “the Google” betrayed his unfamiliarity and Barack Obama chafed at being denied an iPhone but agreed to it.

But with the arrival of Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, Twitter managed to connect the ultimate seat of power to the darkest corners of the web for the first time. There is little evidence that Mr. Trump harbors concerns about promoting accounts that traffic in fake or inflammatory material.

The White House declined to comment for this article and turned down an interview request with the president. But at a White House “social media summit” in July that brought together far-right activists and provocateurs, Mr. Trump expressed appreciation for the fodder he sampled on Twitter.

“The crap that you think of,” he said, “is unbelievable.”

MASTERING THE CRAFT

The path to #FakeWhistleblower stretches back to a seminal conspiracy theory in Trump World: #FakeBirthCertificate.

Mr. Trump’s campaign to sow doubts about Mr. Obama’s birthplace, as he was considering running for president himself in 2012, showcased his talent for propagating a useful lie. It also overlapped with his growing presence on Twitter.

When his account was created in 2009, the three-year-old platform was just beginning to extend its reach beyond a community of journalists, techies and other early adopters. Over time, as high-profile public figures joined and Twitter allowed for longer messages, its influence grew as a forum for people to comment in real time about live events, world leaders to make official pronouncements and celebrities to interact with fans. Twitter said earlier this year that it had 126 million daily active users.

For Mr. Trump, a Twitter account quickly proved useful for promoting himself, sounding off about politics and, eventually, amplifying his attacks on Mr. Obama. By the time he started tweeting the birther smear in November 2011, his fans had already been doing the same, creating memes and hashtags like #FakeBirthCertificate, first used for that purpose in April 2011 by a supporter who cited Mr. Trump in the tweet.

After Mr. Trump started tweeting on his own in early 2013 — he previously had help from an assistant — he was soon recycling misinformation. He retweeted an anti-Obama account that had tweeted at him, “The birth certificate that you forced Obama to show is a computer generated forgery.” And he spun conspiracies within

conspiracies, tweeting: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”

Mr. Trump’s experience using Mr. Obama as a punching bag made him adept at weaponizing what he found on Twitter when he decided to run for president. As his following grew, so did his ability to give prominence to objectionable material and — intentionally or not — those responsible for it.

In early 2016, he twice retweeted an obscure white supremacist account,  @WhiteGenocideTM, that had directed a tweet at him ridiculing Jeb Bush, an opponent in the Republican primary. The since-suspended account, which regularly posted neo-Nazi propaganda and listed its location as “Jewmerica,” gained hundreds of followers in the days after Mr. Trump’s retweets.

By the time he faced off against Hillary Clinton, a perfect storm had coalesced on a more polarized and partisan Twitter — bringing together activists and trolls practiced at spreading conspiracy theories and hate, and Russian intelligence operatives seeking to foment discord. A how-to manual titled “Advanced Meme Warfare” circulated online with instructions for creating material to help the Trump campaign by trashing the Clintons.

“The idea is to stack up so much doubt, emotional appeals, and circumstantial evidence ON TOP of facts that we create a landslide of anti-Hill sentiment that permeates through society,” it said.

As memes ricocheted around Twitter, Mr. Trump frequently retweeted them and made use of hashtags like #CrookedHillary. After he won the election, Mr. Trump was asked if he would continue being combative on Twitter once he settled into the White House. In an interview with “60 Minutes,” he defended his tweeting as “nothing you should be ashamed of,” but pledged to change his tone as president.

“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m going to do very restrained.”

DARK UNDERCURRENTS

The implications of Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit became apparent early in his presidency. In short order, he was railing about “fake news,” questioning the findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and peddling the fiction that millions of illegal ballots had cost him the popular vote.

Beyond his own tweets, the president stepped up his practice of retweeting others, sharing anti-Muslim videos  posted by a British far-right figure who had been retweeted by Ann Coulter. (He later stopped following Ms. Coulter after she criticized him for not making progress on the Mexican border wall.)

That episode highlighted one of the ways the president sees information on Twitter. His feed regularly contains tweets from his son, Donald Jr., who follows and retweets alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian who pushes “white genocide” conspiracy theories and has promoted white nationalists on his YouTube channel.

The younger Mr. Trump has also followed Lauren Southern, another Canadian right-wing activist who has promoted the “great replacement” theory that white populations are being overrun by nonwhite immigrants with the help of global elites. In May, the president retweeted a post in which she complained that far-right voices were being suspended on social media.

Six people the president follows — including Dan Scavino, the White House social media director — in turn follow Terrence K. Williams, a comedian who has been retweeted by Mr. Trump frequently. Among the retweets was a phony smear claiming that a Muslim congresswoman had partied on the anniversary of Sept. 11, and a conspiracy theory linking the Clintons to the suicide of the imprisoned sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Beyond the people he follows, there is another potential pathway to the president on Twitter — his “mentions,” the surging stream of tweets and replies that are directed at him by tagging his handle.

Fake accounts that Twitter identified as being run by foreign intelligence agencies have made frequent use of this tactic to try to get his attention: Russian accounts targeted Mr. Trump with tweets making the false assertion that Russia did not hack the Democratic National Committee’s emails. A Chinese account directed a tweet at him calling CNN “goofy commies.” And an Iranian account heckled him, saying, “Every morning that American people wakeup, they are nervous about your new tweets.”

The odds of his seeing a tagged post amid the deluge are slim, in part because Twitter’s algorithms try to screen out objectionable material and his account may employ filters. Some of his Twitter activity is also managed by Mr. Scavino. Still, Mr. Trump spends time looking at tweets that mention him or hashtags that interest him.

The content he chooses to retweet is similar to his own: mostly partisan attacks and praise for himself, with occasional inflammatory material mixed in. While it is not always clear whether his retweets are intended to endorse their authors, the president is effectively launching those accounts into the public eye.

On St. Patrick’s Day last March, while awaiting the conclusion of the Mueller report, Mr. Trump went on a daylong Twitter tirade, batting out more than 30 tweets that appear to have come from extended immersion in the streams flowing through his account.

The morning dawned with a 6:01 a.m. barb from Donald Trump Jr. — “So many stains on the #GhostofJohnMcCain” — presaging several tweets from the president an hour later attacking the deceased senator over old grudges. At the same time, amid a rapidly building flood of mentions, there was a plea directed at him to “reverse the replacement” of white people, a tweet from an account with an anti-Semitic name demanding Fox News undo the suspension of the host Jeanine Pirro for anti-Muslim comments, and hundreds of references to QAnon.

The president shared a conspiracy-minded post by William Craddick, a right-wing writer who peddled the “pizzagate” hoax that Democratic politicians secretly ran a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria. “Russiagate,” Mr. Craddick wrote, “was designed in part to help the UK counter Russian influence by baiting the United States into taking a hard line against them.” And Mr. Trump sent out a tweet by Jack Posobiec, another pizzagate promoter, linking to a news story about Latino gang members stabbing and burning a teenager.

By nightfall, Mr. Trump had retweeted an obscure QAnon follower who, a few weeks earlier, had pushed the Democratic-pedophilia smear. His retweet of that account — whose profile image is a stylized “Q” wearing a red MAGA hat — drew notice on the online message boards of 4chan, which were abuzz with speculation that the president had tacitly approved of QAnon theories.

The binge ended at 9 p.m., when Mr. Trump tweeted, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Promoting Conspiracies

QAnon entered the public consciousness in October 2017, when someone using the code name “Q” began posting on 4chan, claiming to have secret knowledge of a conspiracy within a Democrat-controlled “deep state” to oust Mr. Trump in a coup.

According to Q’s groundless theory, Mr. Trump was aware of the plot and was quietly working to unravel it with Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, using the Russia investigation as a cover to sweep up the perpetrators through mass arrests. The most extreme adherents of what became known as QAnon — short for “Q Anonymous” — also postulate that the deep state is part of a global network of corrupt elites involved in Satanism, pedophilia and cannibalism.

Remarkably, this conspiracy would migrate from the dark fringes of social media and into conservative political circles, where it took root among a segment of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters. People holding Q signs have shown up at Trump rallies, and the “Q” symbol found its way into a “Women for Trump” 2020 campaign video.

Last year, two QAnon disciples were arrested in separate episodes, and in May the F.B.I. included QAnon in an intelligence bulletin warning of potential violence stemming from “anti-government, identity-based and fringe political conspiracy theories,” particularly as the 2020 election approaches.

There are few places where QAnon’s visibility has been greater than on Twitter, where Mr. Trump has helped propagate it. Although Mr. Trump does not follow any QAnon-related accounts, some in his Twitter circle do.

Bill Mitchell, a conservative podcaster who promotes QAnon, is followed by nine people whom the president follows and has potentially appeared in his feed more than a dozen times. The president has frequently retweeted him, including one post advancing the discredited suggestion that Mr. Obama wiretapped Mr. Trump’s phones in 2016.

In an email to the Times, Mr. Mitchell said he considered the president’s retweets “a hat-tip without an overt endorsement.” He believes that the president is deliberately provocative on Twitter to keep political enemies off balance and unable to “think strategically,” he said.

“Through his tweets, President Trump keeps the Democrats and media in a perpetually heightened emotional state, in this case offense and anger,” he wrote, adding that he respected QAnon’s leaders as “patriots and Trump supporters.”

More than 50 accounts that have QAnon references in their profiles — and dozens more that do not but also promote the conspiracy — appeared among those followed by Donald Trump Jr.; Ms. Bartiromo; Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee; Katrina Pierson, a Trump campaign adviser; Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio; and a handful of others who are all, in turn, followed by the president.

There is no indication that these people, who collectively follow thousands of accounts, are aware of the QAnon presence that lurks there, much less support it.

But the potential for QAnon accounts to appear in the presidential feed underscores the viral nature of disinformation on Twitter, where a tweet can hatch on the fringes, hopscotch through layers of accounts and, aided by hashtags and bots, gain wide currency.

On Thursday evening, a QAnon promoter tweeted an unsubstantiated yarn that years ago he overheard a key witness in the impeachment inquiry bad-mouthing America and talking up “Obama & globalism.” QAnon accounts passed it around, and by the next morning it had been retweeted by Mr. Posobiec, who in turn was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. — in less than 24 hours, the story had wormed its way into the president’s Twitter circle.

And it has happened before. During a busy Sunday morning of tweeting in August, Ms. Bartiromo retweeted an anonymous account called @QBlueSkyQ that had posted a series of conspiratorial messages about the Russia investigation, along with a video snippet of her Fox interview with George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide arrested in the scandal.

Even a glance at @QBlueSkyQ’s profile would have revealed that it was a die-hard QAnon account. It has tweeted doctored images and fake memes promoting a falsehood that top Democrats sexually torture children to harvest adrenochrome — a chemical derived from adrenaline — for a life-extending elixir. The @QBlueSkyQ retweet was one of at least a half-dozen times Ms. Bartiromo helped circulate such accounts, though none of the posts dealt with the QAnon conspiracy directly. Ms. Bartiromo declined to comment.

QAnon accounts have also been retweeted by Mr. Bolling, a former Fox News commentator. Mr. Bolling, who declined to comment, has retweeted an anonymous QAnon account called @K12Lioness several times, most of it partisan political material and all unrelated to the Q conspiracy.

But in between the run-of-the-mill tweets that caught Mr. Bolling’s attention, the account was also pumping out vile memes and messages from the deepest fringes of the QAnon universe, like this post in June: “The Democrats have lost their minds (adrenochrome) eating baby parts. MY GOD Americans WAKE UP!!”

DEPLOYING THE TROLLS

Mr. Trump was two weeks from his inauguration in January 2017 when he tweeted, “So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers?”

It would be the start of a relentless campaign, continuing to the present, to dispute that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election. Eventually, the narrative would merge with another — that Mr. Biden intervened in Ukraine to protect his son’s business interests — in the now-infamous phone call in which Mr. Trump pressed Ukraine’s president to search for the D.N.C.’s email server, implying without evidence that it was somewhere in his country.

That effort began within days of Mr. Biden’s official campaign announcement in April, when a Trump supporter tweeted a meme of Mr. Biden with the words, “China & Ukraine, Quid Pro Joe.” The post prompted another Trump fan to put a hashtag to use: #QuidProJoe. The #QuidProJoe and #FakeWhistleblower hashtags had both been created years earlier for issues unrelated to Mr. Biden and Ukraine, but were dusted off and put into service by Trump supporters.

The #QuidProJoe hashtag remained relatively dormant until a few weeks later, when it was retweeted seven times by a pro-Trump, bot-like account that cranks out more than 100 tweets a day, including QAnon and fervent anti-Democratic material. The hashtag steadily gained currency, and by September, when news erupted of the whistle-blower complaint filed a month earlier, it was part of a growing arsenal of social media tools seized on by Mr. Trump’s supporters, including Donald Jr.

A slew of hashtags — nearly all of them created by anonymous, unverified accounts, some connected to QAnon — have been deployed on Twitter in recent months attacking the impeachment inquiry, and in particular Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee. Many have crude names, like #LyingSackOfSchiff, #SchiffForBrains and #FullOfSchiff.

So far, none of those hashtags has gotten a presidential tweet. But every day, Mr. Trump offers his Twitter fans reason for hope.

On Oct. 19, between tweeting “Shifty Schiff is Corrupt” and retweeting an anonymous account that regularly traffics in alt-right and Russian propaganda, the president tweeted out a fresh hashtag being pushed by his supporters: #StopTheCoup.

Twitter went wild.

______

The New York Times reviewed every tweet and retweet sent by President Trump from Jan. 20, 2017, through Oct. 15, 2019. Retweets include those with and without comment. The Times reviewed each account retweeted by Mr. Trump and determined whether the account was verified or not. The Times then evaluated the unverified accounts to determine whether they had been suspended by Twitter or had tweeted conspiracy theories.

______

Sources: Trump Twitter Archive, Internet Archive, YouGov, RussiaTweets.com, Politwoops

Rich Harris contributed reporting. Produced by Gray Beltran and Rumsey Taylor.

🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈

Trump’s Twitter Presidency: 9 Key Takeaways

By Mike McIntire and Nicholas Confessor | Published Nov. 2, 2019 Updated 5:15 PM ET | New York Times | Posted November 2, 2019 |

Donald J. Trump has exploited social media like no other American president, using it as a springboard to change policy, as a cudgel against critics and as an outlet for self-affirmation. “He needs to tweet like we need to eat,” said Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor.

Along the way, he has lent credibility to unsavory Twitter accounts through his habit of retweeting posts that catch his attention, seemingly without regard for who is behind them or their motives.

In three articles, The New York Times analyzed Mr. Trump’s posts, studied the accounts he follows and interviewed dozens of administration officials, lawmakers, Twitter executives and ordinary Americans caught up in his tweets. Here are some of our findings.

ATTACK , ATTACK, ATTACK — With A Notable Exception

Over half of the president’s more than 11,000 tweets are attacks, aimed at everything and everyone from the Russia investigation and the Federal Reserve to black football players and Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. But in more than 2,000 tweets, Mr. Trump has cited one person for praise: himself.

The President’s Staff Wanted His Tweets On A 15-minute Delay

Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, The Times learned, top aides discussed asking Twitter to impose a 15-minute delay on his account, not unlike the five-second naughty-word system used by television networks. But they quickly abandoned the idea after recognizing the political peril if the idea leaked to the press — or to their boss.

Foreign Intelligence Services Try To Catch His Attention

Twitter accounts tied to state-sponsored propaganda operations in China, Iran and Russia have directed thousands of posts at Mr. Trump. The accounts frequently promoted conspiracy theories or support for Mr. Trump’s policies. One wrote, “We love you Mr. President!” Mr. Trump retweeted it.

Mr. Trump’s Retweets Have Given A Boost To Extremists

The president has retweeted at least 145 unverified accounts that push conspiracy or extremist content, including more than two dozen that have since been suspended by Twitter. Among them are white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots and adherents of QAnon, a conspiracy theory involving satanic pedophiles and the “deep state” whose followers have been labeled a potential domestic terror threat by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

HE DOESN’T FOLLOW BACK

Much of the questionable material Mr. Trump recirculates comes from the steady flow of tweets, about 1,000 per minute, that tag his handle.But it also comes from the tiny number of accounts that Mr. Trump follows and that make up his curated feed — just 47 at present, most of them members of his family, celebrities, Fox News hosts or Republican politicians. Some of those people, in turn, follow Twitter accounts that promote QAnon, express anti-Islam attitudes or espouse white nationalist views.

You’ve probably never seen him tweet in public

That’s because he doesn’t like to wear the reading glasses he needs to see his iPhone screen. Instead, the president dictates tweets to Dan Scavino, the White House social media director. Sometimes, Mr. Scavino prints out suggested tweets in extra-large fonts for Mr. Trump to sign off on.

Mornings Are For Tweeting

Mr. Trump’s Twitter habit is most intense at the start of the day, when he is in the White House residence, often watching Fox News, scrolling through his Twitter mentions and turning the platform into what one aide called the “ultimate weapon of mass dissemination.” Nearly half of his “attack tweets” were sent between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., time that he spends mostly without advisers present.

We Read Every Single Presidential Tweet Ever

The president has bragged 183 times about his crowd size or applause at events; attacked immigrants 570 times; praised dictators 132 times; and called the news media the “enemy of the people” 36 times. On 16 occasions, Mr. Trump referred to himself as everyone’s “favorite president.”

Twitter Is Not Real Life

According to data from YouGov, which polls about each of the president’s tweets, some of the topics on which Mr. Trump gets the most “likes” and retweets — jabs at the N.F.L., posts about the special counsel’s investigation, unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud — poll poorly with the general public.

🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈🍻🍁🏈

[mst3kproject]

418: Attack of the The Eye Creatures

I hate this movie.

You know, Red Zone Cuba sucked.  Manos: the Hands of Fate sucked.  The Creeping Terror sucked giant woolly sheep balls (have you ever seen a sheep's testicles?  They're enormous). But all of those were made by people who were fucking trying. Coleman Francis, Hal Warren, and Vic Savage all really, really wanted to make a movie, and they all failed so hard it could probably be seen from space, but they tried.  Larry Buchanan did not try, and maybe that's why this movie is so bad that it actively pisses me off.  Attack of the The Eye Creatures is to film what Gotta Get Down on Friday is to music, or KFC to food, or Troll 2 to dignity.  It doesn't merely blow.  It is an insult to the entire concept.

The ways in which Larry Buchanan and everyone who worked for him failed to even try is long and detailed, and Joel and the bots covered quite a few points in their They Just Didn't Care sketch.  In an attempt to avoid simply rehashing that, I will take everything in the sketch as a given: the daytime filming, the awful costuming, and the incomplete The Eye Creatures are all off-limits for this review.  They may be mentioned in passing but only on my way to another point.

This movie is about a bunch of young people played by actors in their mid-thirties.  A couple of drifters, Carl and Mike, are looking for a way to make some money.  Two students, Stan and Susie, are looking for a place to get married.  On their way to their elopement, Stan and Susie run into an An Eye Creature crossing the street – they run off to find help, and meanwhile Carl happens across their car and the dead alien.  He is attacked by the other The Eye Creatures, who take away the body of their colleague and replace it with Carl's body, and Stan and Susie are then arrested for his murder.  Their only chance to escape prison is to get Mike to back up their story.  And while all this goes on, the air force incompetently tries to make contact with the The Eye Creatures' landed saucer.

None of this feels like it really matters.  The story stumbles from plot point to plot point like a drunk man in a dark room.  There's also stuff going on with an old man who's frustrated at the local teenagers using his property as a make-out spot, and two soldiers who are supposed to be watching for more flying saucers landing but are actually spying on the teenagers.  There's a severed hand crawling around and causing shenanigans.  Susie's father doesn't approve of her dating Stan.  And none of these disparate events ever come together into a coherent story.

Attack of the The Eye Creatures is actually a remake of the 1957 movie Invasion of the Saucer Men.  There are lots of reasons why films get re-made.  John Carpenter re-made The Thing from Another World because aspects of the original story had inspired him to try a different take on it.  I tend to assume that Gus Van Sant remade Psycho as a commentary on the artistic merits of remakes, at least in my more charitable moments.  Fox Studios re-made The Fantastic Four repeatedly in order to keep the rights to the characters.  And Michael Bay re-made Parts: the Clonus Horror as The Island because he saw a chance to get Scarlett Johansson to take her clothes off.

I cannot guess why anybody wanted to re-make Invasion of the Saucer Men as Attack of the The Eye Creatures less than ten years after the original movie – Invasion of the Saucer Men doesn't appear to have even been particularly successful and had a weird moral lesson about how drinking will kill you.  Whatever their motivation, Attack of the The Eye Creatures is worse in every respect.

Maybe they wanted a colour version.  Invasion of the Saucer Men was in black and white, but the photography was crisp and the shots were well-framed – it was directed by Edward L. Cahn, who never really made a good or successful movie but made a lot of very entertaining ones, including It! The Terror from Beyond Space, the indescribably amusing The Creature with the Atom Brain, and another MST3K number, The She-Creature.  Attack of the The Eye Creatures is in colour, but the film stock is of such poor quality and the colour itself so washed out that it almost doesn't matter.  It just makes the movie look like it was shot on home video in the mid 80's.  Considering that Attack of the The Eye Creatures appears to have cost less than the cars that appear in it, they probably should have stuck to black and white and spent that extra money on, I don't know, a better script or a couple more monster suits.  Or proofreading their own goddamn title.

The use of the colour film is detrimental to the movie in another way, too: it's the reason the day-for-night is so monstrously shitty. Black and white makes it much easier to believe that night-time scenes are happening at night, as long as you never point the camera directly at the sky.  They Just Didn't Care covered this, so I'll stop there – but they did not mention the constant cricket noises.  Or the actual shots of the sun behind the clouds that stand in for shots of the moon.  Could they not afford stock footage of the moon?  Did they actually think this looked good?  Larry Buchanan is dead, so I guess we'll never know.

Maybe the remake was a chance to revamp the aliens.  While the monster suits are terrible, I have to say that the design of the aliens is the one place where somebody involved in this movie seems to have actually tried.  That person was probably a concept artist who didn't even get a credit, but whoever it was did put some thought into what an alien afraid of light might look like.  The aliens of Invasion of the Saucer Men were pretty typical pop culture aliens, with big eyes, big heads, and skinny bodies.  The The Eye Creatures are lumpy, pasty-white, and covered with eyes.  The design is ridiculous and they're obviously people in costumes, but creatures who live in perpetual darkness, like cave fish, do tend to be white, and multiple eyes seems like a good idea if it's hard to see.  Well done, anonymous costume designer.  You cared 600% more than anybody else on this project.

The costume designer certainly cared more than the people who only made partial costumes and just had the extras stand behind bushes. And whoever decided that having an An Eye Creature fall off a cliff could be accomplished by throwing an empty monster suit off.

I can't even add anything to that.  It looks even worse than you remember.

The The Eye Creature falling off the cliff is connected with a baffling 'joke' in which the two airmen spying on the kids think they've accidentally picked up a television broadcast.  They make a bet over whether the monster is about to fall off the cliff, it does, and the loser accuses the winner of having seen the movie before.  The scene is scored as if it's supposed to be funny, but it's not, and it has nothing to do with anything else in the movie.  The The Eye Creature who falls off the cliff is never found, nothing comes of the incident.

I do not think the remake was an effort to streamline the meandering plot, because the cliff The Eye Creature is by no means the only sequence that seems completely irrelevant.  The entire subplot with the soldiers is clearly meant to skewer the concept of government secrecy and certain aspects of bureaucracy, but it's so heavy-handed and bizarre that the scenes feel like they somehow got cut into the wrong movie.  In Invasion of the Saucer Men, the soldiers had slightly more role in the story and were a tiny bit closer to actually being funny.  Likewise Old Man Bailey, whose voice and dialogue are virtually indistinguishable from the 'bots mockery of it and was only included in Attack of the The Eye Creatures because the plot requires a phone to be available (ah, the dark ages before cell phones).  In most movies about aliens invading hick towns, the crazy old man with a gun at least tries to shoot one of them, but Old Man Bailey never even sees an An Eye Creature, not even the one inexplicably hiding in his closet.

You've probably noticed that I just can't get over the title thing. Clearly this film was originally called just The Eye Creatures and somebody thought Attack of the Eye Creatures would sound better. The person who was charged with altering the title card, however, simply added Attack of the overtop the words The Eye Creatures, leaving us with Attack of the The Eye Creatures, and this somehow made it to a finished print!  Did they not notice?  Did they think nobody else would notice?  Or did nobody even bother to take a second look?  The title problem really seems to sum up the whole They Just Didn't Care aesthetic of the movie, and it is in deference to this truly jaw-dropping level of not giving a shit that I refuse to abbreviate the title for this review.

God, this movie is so much more terrible than it had to be. I generally feel like if something's worth doing, it's worth putting effort in.  Partly this is because I work in a field where if I make a mistake people can suffer medical consequences, but also just because I like to take some pride in what I'm doing, whether it's my official job or knitting a sock or writing movie reviews on the internet.  I can't imagine anybody being proud of Attack of the The Eye Creatures.  The entire movie is that essay you start at midnight the day before it's due and finish at four AM after nine cups of coffee.  The only emotion in it is “aw, fuck it, let's just get this over with,” which is exactly how I feel about watching the result.

If you're gonna see this movie, see it as Invasion of the Saucer Men.  It's not a very good movie but it's a hell of a lot better than Attack of the The Eye Creatures, even with the booze-is-poison agenda.  The plot makes more sense, the cinematography is worthy of the name, and nobody walks around wearing nothing but an ugly sweater dress.