Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Monday, July 23, 2001

Shit shit shit! Why do I never plan ahead? Had I known that Joe versus the Volcano, first mutant spawn of the Hanks-Ryan entente was on today, I might have sawn off my own leg in order to engineer a chance to tape it and watch it frame-by-frame, searching for the moment when the eerie glow of demonic possession first burned behind the eyes of Hanks.

Channel 5 is the source of all goodness, frankly. I would like to reassure the Capstan that he is missing nothing by being unable to watch Cleopatra 2525 but alas it rocks harder than mortal mind might comprehend. If proof were needed that this is the happiest thing ever, being as it is a massively derivative, high-camp, diabolically scripted mixture of the Terminator, the Matrix, Barbarella and Xena: Warrior Princess, one need only wait until the opening credits.

Charmed, shit Shannon Dochery/Alyssa Milano vehicle and pile of way sub-Buffy shagwankery managed to elevate itself from sheer mouldy old cockness by getting in a grunge-rawk cover version of The Smiths' "How Soon is Now". But to avoid confusing the special people who made up its audience, they cut all that stuff about a shyness that is criminally vulgar and there being a club where you'd like to go, and indeed the eternal question of how you can say I go about things the wrong way. So, the song in its entirety went:

I am the son and the heir....(ellipsis)
I am human and I need to be loved...just like everybody else does.

Beautiful. And, I had felt, untoppable. Until I heard the campy disco reworking of Zager and Evans Hippyschtick classic "In the Year 2525". Not since victim-of-allegations-of-art-crime-serial-killing epic "I have not been to Oxford Town" was half-inched for Starship Troopers has a culture-concept car crash left me so aesthetically tumescent.

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