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Green Sunday Chapter 2; This Charming man (Edited reupload)

Here it is finally, after much faffing about over the holidays I finally managed to sort this out and get back on track with the editing and continuous writing of this literary monstrosity. I’m already about 40k into it and I see no end in sight, it’s almost beaten my first secret novel which will never be revealed except for exclusive rights to the movie and merchandise haha. I can dream.

 

As always if you liked this chapter or you’re new to the story and want to go back to the start head on over to my inkitt page for the complete story in a neat order and in a format that I’m sure can be read on all manner of magical devices, wiggets and wablets and magic hats and scrolls I’m sure.

Green Sunday Chapter 2

An old TV, sitting on a greasy-looking shelf, played in the background in a local greasy spoon diner on the edge of town. The diner was alive with the sounds of knives and forks sword-fighting; people taking deluxe bites out of reasonably priced burgers, and washing them down with complementary milkshakes.

“The Pudgiwara Corporation today said they were very sorry for dumping the one thousand tonnes of toxic waste in the bay and they said they’d never do it again.” The news anchor furrowed his brow sincerely before moving on to the next segment. “In other local news, a young boy of fourteen was arrested after a prank backfired outside his suburban home. The boy, who is yet to be named for legal reasons, was tricked by his friends into believing that another biological outbreak, similar to that of the one in Arkham, Louisiana, was underway. Police state that the boys school friends wore make-up and ragged clothing and pretended to be the undead. The boy fearing for his life retrieved his 22. Calibre rifle he received for his third birthday and slaughtered them all in his back yard”

“Hahahahahahahahahaha!” Incongruous laughter broke out. It seemed that all the knife and fork sword fights ended abruptly. But the laughter went on regardless as the story played out.

“The fourteen year old boy then, fearing for the fate of his family, went into his suburban home and strangled his entire family to death with a draught excluder”

“Hahahahahahahahahahaahahahaha!” A dirty hand, topped with dirty, chipped nails, scooped up a clod of hamburger meat from a steel bowl as he laughed.

“What’s going on out here?” A fat sweaty man in an apron, and not a lot else, came out of the back. A confused look on his face, he stood next to a middle-aged redhead waitress with a face like a leather riding saddle.

“Some crazy guy. All he ordered was a bowl of raw hamburger meat. He’s just been sitting there eating it. Then he just started laughing,” the middle-aged woman said, her face wrinkling up in places never before thought possible.

The fat man’s sweat patches grew under his apron. He started to look like he belonged in a sauna or in a tropical plant house as he breathed heavily.

“The boy is currently under observation at Hellspass psychiatric hospital.” The man’s laughter began to run down like the motor of a car sliding into park. A greasy hand touched the arm of his salvation army coat and the slow come-down took a sudden bump.

“Hey, buddy, you’re freakin’ people out. Can ya keep it down? People are trying to eat,” the fat chef said, in an apologetic tone, as he furrowed his brow into painful ‘v’s, which seemed to stretch all over his slippery bald head.

“What’s that?” the man said without turning his head. A chunk of unchewed hamburger meat fell from his mouth onto the semi-clean counter. He turned his bloodshot eyes in his skull.

“I said-”

“I heard what you said.”

“Huh?”

“I just can’t tell what I’m looking at.” He picked his teeth with a dirty nail and sucked his gums, dislodging raw meat.

“Look, buddy, we aint looking for no trouble. I think you better just pick your sorry ass up and leave – right now!”

“Did you make this?” The strange, homeless guy squeezed the hamburger meat in his hands, letting it ooze through his bony fingers. He had shoulder-length mousey brown hair, with a long beard completing the homeless chic. His features were thin and gaunt, dark eyes hidden under heavy lids. He wore a long, olive drab army jacket that went all the way down to his ankles, hiding the fact that he was wearing plastic bags tied with string around his feet instead of shoes. To complete the ensemble: a threadbare shirt and pair of pants that looked like they’d gone missing from an old people’s home washing line. Printed across the front of the jacket was a name written in bold dark green lettering. ‘CARPENTER’.

“What’cha talking about, buddy? That’s raw hamburger meat. Aint nobody ‘made’ it. Drifters like you don’t belong here; it’s time for you to move on now!”

“You know, I used to be just like you”

“Get ou-!” A glob of hamburger meat cut off the chef mid-sentence. The slimy, gelatinous meat by-product got into his eyes and nose. It felt like a fist made of lumpy snot hitting his sinus wall. He felt disorientated, giving the dishevelled man ample time to kick a bar stool. The chef fell forward as the stool hit his shins, tripping him. Carpenter rose like a jack-in-the-box on angel dust from his stool to slam the chef’s dirty face into the counter.

He pressed the chef’s face into the off-colour lime green diner counter, spreading blood and raw meat and spit all over it. The chef strained as he began to get light-headed, his skull pressed against the hard surface.

“You know it’s rude to interrupt someone when they’re eating.” Carpenter squeezed the chef’s head with his forearm against the counter. The veins on the chef’s head stuck out like rail-road tracks, pumping hot kitchen grease. Carpenter took his other hand and ran his finger up from his face taking up some of the hamburger meat. Getting under his nails, he sucked his finger.

He took the pressure off and sat back on his stool like he got up to get the salt. The chef stuck to the counter with blood and sweat and hamburger meat. Peeling off, his unconscious body hit the linoleum floor of the diner like a sack of dried hams. He parted stools and chairs and brows as he fell. The diner fell silent. Food went unchewed in open mouths; coffee cups shook; babies continued crying; the dishevelled man went back to watching the news and laughing.

…

If you liked what you read of this excerpt, follow the link below to read the rest of the chapter on inkitt.

Cheers.

Green Sunday Chapter 2

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Green Sunday; Ramblings of a Zombie Apologist

I know the first instinct you have when you hear ‘zombie horror’ to the most cynical of hipsters is to utter a collective angsty yawn. But give me a break. I’m writing a zombie story, Green Sunday is a for lack of a better term, coined by Shaun of the Dead a RomZomCom. Just give me a chance, come back! Hey! It’s nothing like Walking Dead!… Hmm that may have backfired.
Well for the people that got through that and are still reading which is probably all of three people, I thank you and now I shall begin my zombie apologetics.

The reason I wrote this story is two-fold, I wanted to write a zombie story, but every motherfucker wants to write a zombie story, especially every crazy motherfucker like me that wants it to actually happen. But I wanted to write it from the perspective of someone like me, someone who wants it to happen. I thought this might help me understand why I want that and why that’s crazy. I realise it’s a state of cognitive dissonance, I want the zombie apocalypse to happen so I can use my collection of sharp pointy things and have a blast but I also don’t want it to happen because I like not having to cut my friends and family into bits because they’re trying to eat me and more importantly Fallout 4 is coming out next month. Maybe next year.

Zombie stories are tricky because essentially they’re too easy, you can’t write a story just about zombies. Zombies are just an inciting incident, they’re just a framing device for what is essentially a disaster movie and overall a character drama. It’s not about the zombies it’s about how the characters react to the zombies. The zombies aren’t characters, they don’t have back stories or motivation, they’re just flesh eating monsters that could be replaced by nearly anything; Aliens, flesh eating penguins, fish men, the world’s worse case of herpes.

They’re not important to the story except as an obstacle and to be honest people like watching people kill people, they don’t really want to see people killing animals and with aliens that’s sort of a grey area. There must be something in our brains that just prefers to watch people die, harking back to the coliseums.

So why choose zombies if they’re so overdone? For that exact reason. I wanted to write a story satirises the oversaturation of zombies into our culture and to mock from the inside people like me. Nutters that are preparing or at least fantasising about it really happening. Saying something is overdone is just a way of trying to lower the market value so you can do it when no one’s paying attention and come out the omega hipster, like me ha-ha. No.

I’m a writer nothing is overdone if it’s done well, everything can be turned on its head, when someone has an expectation that’s when they’re the most vulnerable to have their expectation completely levelled and you have them by the seat of their pants.

I wanted to write a zombie apocalypse story that wasn’t really about a zombie apocalypse and to mock zombie apocalypses and this spate of summer teen movies like Hunger Games just a bit. So I thought instead of making a straight up zombie apocalypse story or a post apocalyptic story, I’d write a post-post-apocalyptic story.

It’s always been the case that the most far-fetched thing about a zombie apocalypse is the idea of it actually happening or indeed ending the world. Even an air born virus probably wouldn’t end the world, it could kill 80% of the worlds’ population and would definitely change the world but it wouldn’t end it. So how could a virus spread by touch/bite spread so quickly, and how could it overcome every army/police force/pmc of the world? Or indeed happen in a country like America where ‘There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass’ as Isoroku Yamamoto Fleet Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during World War II is according to wikiquote is misquoted as saying.

But obviously I don’t live in America, I live in England, but we still have armed police and despite what you may here about our gun laws, we still have guns, knives, cricket bats. I set it in America essentially to mock America and open it up a wider audience. America is always rife for parody as it has the delightful habit of taking everything to its greatest extreme. Although this ‘prepper culture’ has spread to the UK, it started and it lives in the US. And really for the story to work it needed an isolated are and although there are small villages (like the one I’m from) and lots of open spaces and countryside. I wanted a small mountain town to really capture the isolation possible even in a semi-thriving small town.

Ok I realised I’ve been waffling around the point, the story is I suppose a little more like Dead Rising the videogame. I.e. This shit is done on purpose, it’s not an accident or a virus, this is an isolated incident done for a specific reason. Not as a test but for fun.

Green Sunday is named for the main character, Sunday is sort of a modern homage to Red Sonja, and before I start pandering telling you how she’s a ‘bad ass/asskicking’ woman and the quintessential and much sort after ‘strong female character’, I posed her as more sort of a Don Quixote character or a Sherlock Holmes. She’s the main character but as a whole She is left a mystery and the story is told through the eyes of her cohort, her Dr. Watson; TJ.

That way I felt that she could remain a mystery and through TJ she could be this tough character but waves of softness could be intermittently shone on him from time to time for a potential romance (I say potential because I’m in the process of writing it and I’m not sure Sunday really likes him, sometimes I have a scene planned out and it goes down a completely different path which better fits the character themselves).

Waffle fit yet again, tangents, tangents everywhere! The story is about a zombie game show, I got it out, there it is. Beautiful isn’t it? Not really *Shakes head*.

Ok so the generic ‘Sinister Corporation with ties to the government’ moves into town and seals it off to play their own little internet zombie game show. So it’s basically Battle Royale meets Dead Rising or Resident Evil. I’m trying to capture the irony of the main characters being zombie obsessed Youtubers caught in what is essentially a zombie internet reality show. And they have to fight for their lives over three gruelling days of bloody violence.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I’m having a hell of a lot of fun writing it, the zombie stuff is always good fun, with a feckless neckbeard fanboy character propelling the story and lots of crazy people brought into the town to fight and rich assholes paying to hunt zombies, it’s a delicious clusterfuck of gore and black humour.

The first ‘beta’ chapter is up for you to read on inkitt, I’ve proofread it but it’s still away with my editor, so hopefully within the month I can re-upload it after it’s been professionally edited and then move onto the next chapter.

Follow this link Green Sunday to read the first chapter and review it and tell me it sucks ass just read it ha-ha.

See ya.

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Welcome to Bat Country, breakdown of the first issue.

I wanted to do a breakdown of the first issue of Bat Country, try to make some sense out of the whole mess that is Bat Country, try to lay that whole twisted bag of snakes out, and if you’ve read any of it, you know this is going to be a long one.

If people would ask me what I wanted to achieve with this book, I don’t really know if I could sum it up in a few words. But I guess the closest thing I could say would just be a fear of open spaces. I wanted to cultivate and exacerbate my fear of the outside world. That’s basically what the title means; the world is full of carnivorous flying rodents that want to suck your blood.

Basically I’m just trying to make excuses for why this comic makes no sense ha-ha. It’s told from the perspective of someone who can’t see in straight lines, everything enters his brain differently and since he’s the narrator of his own story, the narrative is unreliable.

So the first page I get my sneaky twin peaks reference in to Big Ed’s Gas farm (I’ll look a right twat if that’s wrong now ha-ha) and get into my thing about sugar, I’m sure if I was some hypersensitive writer for the guardian I’d call it ‘sugarshaming’ ha-ha. But since I’m not I tend to think people associate lots of sugar with childishness, as if growing older means you no longer see a reason to enjoy ‘the sweet life. I wanted to introduce Ransom as a character that relished in his childishness and was almost petulant in his reaction to people trying to shame him into conforming to their own way of thinking.

TLDR: Motherfucker like his coffee sweet.

I think maybe a year or two ago, I began this strange fascination with cooking shows or just food shows in general. I watched come dine with me just to watch absolute cunts sit and try to withstand each other for a few evenings in a row, talking shit about each other in the backroom. There was something delicious about uncomfortable silences shared by complete strangers who had never the less grown to hate each other over the course of one evening ha-ha. English people like myself have such an acquired taste for awkwardness.

Then I started to watch Man VS Food, for those that haven’t watched it, it’s basically a show about a chubby American fellow going from town to town taking up eating challenges. Eating a giant burger or a colossal omelette or something, or a really hot curry. I really enjoyed it for the food (I love food) and the competitive nature, it was just a fun show.

But this was when I was little more social justicey, so I started to spin my Marxist (did away with those thankfully away, just a nice empty space now ha-ha) and it made me think this show was everything wrong with America. It was decadent, ‘people are starving’ I said to myself as I watched this pudgy American stuff his face with a hotdog the size of a skateboard.

I was both in awe and disgust with America and the American way, a fine line between love and hate indeed.

One of my many fantasies is that of walking the earth like Cain in Kung fu, I’ve often thought about just walking, getting into some adventures and just travelling. Then to hit the ground realising I have no money and my shoes are made from inedible canvas. The realities of it were just too glaring, how would I eat, how would I make enough money to travel and survive? But then I realised that in America those two things could coincide. In the wondrous USA you can be paid for eating, so something that could have been just a throwaway piece of plot filler became almost the crux of the story.

On a whole the basic joke of the story is that it’s almost as if to America thinks it can reach enlightenment through eating. Purely by how much they eat and how much of science they honed of gluttony.

This was going to by my satirical comic poking fun at the American dream, the hypocrisy of modern culture and capitalism and religion and all that good stuff. But after a while those things started to bore me and realised that trying to force people to think like me through a comic made me as bad as the assholes I was critiquing, so I cut that shit out. Now I just want to make people laugh and make them think and deliver something so fucking out there, they’ll never forget.

Diagnosis love is another reference to Twin peaks, well the first season, which is my favourite. It had this soap opera running in the background of the occasional episode, the story of which was cheesy but was a mirror of what was happening in the show. I really liked the feel of it and how it added another layer to story, making it seem self aware. I initially was introduced by this; I don’t know what you call it really in Max Payne 2. The idea that you can’t tell if you’re mimicking the art or it’s mimicking you. Obviously Max Payne must have copied it from Twin Peaks.

I suppose in a way a part of me wanted to mock most other webcomics where this type of storytelling isn’t intentionally cheesy and ridiculous ha-ha. It’s there to contrast the goings on in the ‘real world’ but mirror them just enough to seem relate-able.

It’s choked full of odd references, Night of the Hunter, Wild at heart, dune, Beetlejuice, I want to get across to the reader that outside to Ransom is literally an alien planet, these diners in the middle of nowhere are like ‘safe spaces’ from all that nature trying to get him.

Liberty or the cowboy is another matter all together; I guess he’s a reference to the Big Lebowski in a way.

The first issue that makes me cringe is the dialogue; yeah my own dialogue makes me cringe. I wanted to copy the style of Max Payne, Address Unknown and Twin Peaks, so essentially I wanted the dialogue to be as cheesy and as hackneyed as possible. I want it to feel fake and strange and just wrong, like a 90’s TV show. And gradually if people keep reading that’ll fade away and it’ll grow with the reader. It’s very much, I hate to say like Natural Born Killers (I hated that movie), the style, the critic of American culture. That niggling feeling that all that freedom and all that space gives you. I can’t help feeling that that feeling is intoxicating and addictive and the reason for all the evil in the world and all the good.
People can be so free they feel trapped, they have all this power to do whatever they want but they stay where they are, pacing back and forth in a cage of their own making. Or they toss it all away like Ransom and burn out rather than fade away. That’s conflict we have here, that’s what I think American culture is, ultimate freedom driving people mad, I don’t think it’s a bad thing, quite the opposite in fact.

Now the second part of the story, some paranoid people are actually being followed. Now I can’t hope to hide this, this entire scene was inspired by my favourite scene in Mulholland Drive, the hitman scene. I thought that scene was so funny, I couldn’t resist. I really love that film and I feel robbed that it wasn’t turned into a full TV show as it was intended, I would have really loved to have seen more from that bungling hitman. I can’t help feeling if Netflix existed in the 90’s Lynch would have been even more popular than he is and not this cult god we admonish him as now.

This scene where the henchmen are going through his apartment is a back story hint, the story of Bat Country just like Twin Peaks starts in the middle. The reader will have to work back as the story moves forward to understand why Ransom is on his journey and who he’s running from.

I got a lot of influence from Silent Hill 4 the room. That game really stuck with me for the voyeuristic nature, and its dreamlike interpretation of agoraphobia. Despite it bombing I found it really intriguing. Another influence is Oldboy, but that might be too spoilery ha-ha.

I was listening to the new Nick Cave album when I wrote this scene and for some reason I decided to put lyrics from Higgs Bosom Blues directly into the scene, don’t ask me why.

Ransom is on a journey, he’s trying to find the American dream and these two bumbling killers are following him.

He wakes from his dream for a minute then he’s back in it again harder than ever. The idea for this comic sort of came from the idea of the idea of the hero. What is a hero? To me a hero is a normal person who has no regard for themselves whatsoever, they’re not afraid of pain, they’re not afraid of humiliation or getting things horribly wrong. And that’s what Ransom tries to be.
I wanted the combat to be real and disgusting and brutal and just… messy and Florian really delivered with this scene. He really captured the brutality and the inelegance of an actual fight, no kung fu bullshit, no gimmicks, just blood and cuts and tooth and nails.

…and then it ends as abruptly as it started. I wanted the first issue to be a snapshot, a glimpse into this dream world, something that would make someone want to dig deeper and discover the underlying meaning. But shit, I’ve rambled enough.

Just go read it already ha-ha.
http://tapastic.com/series/Bat-Country

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Blue Velvet

It sounds more and more pretentious every time I say it but one of my biggest influences when I write right now and in the creative process in general is David Lynch.

Which is odd to say it’s pretentious because Lynch’s work, I find remarkably unpretentious, so distinctly odd without necessarily trying to be, just unrestrainedly uncommon and intriguing. Every one of his films and Twin Peaks is almost like someone took the idea of film making or a tv show and handed it to an Alien and he made his own interpretation that was like what had come before but so drastically but indescribably different. Something you just couldn’t put your finger on but it was rolling around in your brain itching in the corners of your eyes and just couldn’t get it.

I’m not a lifelong fan, I had seen the Elephantman and Dune but I think I was too young to have been caught up in Twin Peaks at the time of its release and those two movies are probably the worst ones to watch in retrospect. Both films are constrained by one being true and the other being based on a sci-fi novel.

So he slipped through the cracks, while I was quite happy with my Tarantino’s and my Scorcese’s and whomever else grazed my adolescent movie palate.

Until I saw a film that really struck an odd note with me that sticks with me even now and no it wasn’t actually by David Lynch *plot twist* it was by Jennifer Lynch, his talented daughter. The movie was called Surveillance, a really haunting off kilter thriller, I love even to this day. But what really stuck with me was the sound track.

The music was haunting and jarring and really something else, I couldn’t help tracking down the soundtrack and finding my favourite song from the film which was called ‘Speed Roadster’ written and performed by… David Lynch.
Who was this alternative/electro/country sounding singer I’d never heard of but couldn’t get enough of; oh what he’s the director’s father? And he’s a writer/director (/among other things, painter/actor) as well? Wow.

Then rather ashamedly I started to put together the dots and I had heard a lot of talk about I think True Detective and how it was ‘like twin peaks’ which in some respects is true. It does capture that haunting sorrow of the unavoidable nature of life and the boundless horror of the unknown (a little Lovecraftian in that respect too, despite it being based on the Yellow King mythos). I may be rewriting my own history here, I can’t be sure, so instead of watching True Detective I watched Twin Peaks (And then eventually True detective) and I was captivated, a little bored/confused at times but I had to keep watching.

There was just something about it, something that made me want to laugh but also cry bitterly and it held me in this state between sorrow and a drunk sort of happiness and each emotion seemed to feed off the other and deepen, the depths of the humour dug larger holes for the sorrow to hide and when the credits rolled over Laura’s face you remembered why you were here.

Frankly I was amazed that such a compelling show could be written about one murder, I can hardly concentrate long enough through an episode of csi or the walking dead where the cast drops like flies.

It was amazing that one fictional person’s life could touch so many people in so many different ways and although she wasn’t technically a character, Laura was the show.

So I initially got into David Lynch not even knowing he made films or tv shows, I just thought he was a weird old guy that made cool music. I loved introducing my brother to Lynch because we watched all his films together and I can’t remember if we watched the Twin Peaks movie Fire walk with me first or not but he hadn’t seen the show before watching. There’s this bit where some weird shit happens and my brother turns to me expecting me to know what the fuck it means because I watched the show and I was like; ‘Dude, I don’t fucking know’ and it was pretty funny.
I was told it didn’t matter if you watched the movie or the show first but I’m glad I watched the show first because it completely depicts Laura’s murder, something I think should never have been done.

In the classic Poe style mystery, the greatest mysteries are the ones that go unsolved.

But producers and ratings and money and bing bang boom, they ruined the whole mystery and then the show limped on after until it eventually keeled over with the help of Billy Zane??

Season 2 in my opinion is a complete clusterfuck, I hold out hope for the reboot, but I intend to keep my expectations as low as possible and coddle myself in the warm embrace of my favourite Lynch films, Blue Velvet being one.

The thing that separates Lynch from any other of my influences is that I not only learnt a lot about story telling from him but also about the creative process in general. I think it’s in a Tom Waits song (Of which the name escapes me) where he says David Lynch told him that he had to sit in a comfy chair and close his eyes and wait for the big one to come along.

Although he may have been alluding to his transcendental meditation woo of which I am not subscribed (I can sit in a chair with my eyes closed without paying like ten quid a month to some swami or whatever) as a fan of Lovecraft this struck a chord with me.

There’s a part of me that is deeply sceptical of woo, all things woo but there’s another part that believes that stories are located in a river in a different dimension and when we close our eyes and concentrate we can catch the odd big fish.
All stories are essentially the same in structure but the core principals of the story come from somewhere else, they’re pieced together from dreams and movies and conversations and some ultra-terrestrial other or just plain pulled out of your ass.

But sometimes I can’t help feeling that I’m not creating stories, I’m just uncovering something that was already there or giving life to something long dead and that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, despite it most likely being bullshit it gives me a nice Lovecraft boner, like I’m in my own story and some ungodly horror is going to burst into the room and tentacle rape me.. what was that noise? On the stairs, it can’t be…*gasp* my eyes, my ey..*indiscernible screaming*.

Check out more strips at Jeffrey Dahmer and Greg the comic strip
And my Lynchian mystery comic here Bat Country

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The new Ghostbuster, a rant.

Ok call me an entitled whiney manbaby all you want, no seriously, get it out of your system, I don’t give a tenth of a fuck. We all know this movie is going to be garbage, every man, woman and child with half a brain who has watched the original films and TV shows (and possibly that shitty game, of which I only played like an hour of because it didn’t have an autosave function, I mean come on, what fucking game doesn’t autosave now, fuck if I’m going back to the start) knows this is unfettered garbage and the man behind it is a fucking shill, but that aside I can’t help but think he’s also a genius.

We know this movie will suck, that goes without saying, no it’s not because of the all female cast, no it’s not misogyny, it’s not the fucking patriarchy, all reboots suck. Find me one reboot that doesn’t want to make your childhood crawl up inside you and choke to death on legos. I watched the remake of Robocop and I almost genuinely cried, I remember going to dig out the old vhs of the original movie and just watching it in the foetal position. Man of Steel was so joyless and boring it was painful to watch, I just watched and laughed out of virtual horror, reeling and asking myself if this was actually a film or someone going back in time and punching Christopher Reeves father in the balls, Dean Cain is weeping softly somewhere as we speak.

Reboots are always shameless cash grabs that nevertheless make money, they’re not good, and they ride the coat tails of their predecessors to trick people into thinking that it’s actually entertainment and not simply unapologetic necrophilia.

But this time it’s different, Paul Feig has been a lot smarter, shifty and shameless and downright fucking reprehensible but smart. I think if I was him and I wanted to do a Ghostbusters remake, I’d punch myself in the face for even thinking it, but if I did it I would do it like this.

Look at it from this perspective; imagine if he did a straight remake? Or he got back the entire original cast to reprise their roles or even if he got an entirely new male cast and just did a straight up reboot. People would fucking hate, it wouldn’t matter if they used necromancy to bring Egon (Yeah I forgot his name sue me) back to life, it would be warming the bottom of the bargain bin. It would suck; it could never live up to the hype of the first two films.

Bill Murray knew it, that’s why he refused to do Ghostbusters 3, it would have been futile after the drop off between one and two, three would have bombed and brought down the whole series. Two movies were all it needed, then the TV shows and yada yada yada, t-shirts, toys all that bullshit.

If a Ghostbusters sequel ever had a chance it would have been then, now the fans are older and more cynical they would tear it apart like soft garlic bread on a sharing platter at Tess Holidays birthday. They would annihilate it.

So I don’t know if Feig is aware or not of this cultural backlash in regards to toxic ideas of feminism infiltrating all aspects of popular culture but he has picked the perfect time to capitalize on that particular dogma. But all that spaghetti aside, rebooting it with an all female cast is genius.

It’s genius because rather than trying to pander to the old fans that will never be happy he’s completely alienated them. Which not only created its own media firestorm, thousands of angry neckbeards like me raging about it over twitter and facebook and wherever, it attracted a whole new generation to see what all the fuss was about.

Women and hipsters drawn by the pangs of agony of nerds like me, like that of a predator hearing an injured animal came in droves to support a movie that caused this much butthurt to a whole generation of people. And they realised exactly what Feig wanted them to realise; that he made this movie for them.

There has to be a whole generation of young men and women that have never even seen Ghostbusters but it still enters their cultural lexicon, despite being too dated for them to actually watch and enjoy. So this appeals to them as not only a fun comedy but a shinier newer version of a movie that was in the background of their childhoods but never quite came into focus. This is their Ghostbusters, just like most people in my generation probably won’t have seen the original nutty professor with Jerry Lewis and instead watched Eddie Murphy do one and a half hour repetition of the same fart joke playing every character and possibly the garden furniture.
It both brilliantly cuts ties with the old movie but keeps enough elements to garner the outrage and the cash the name Ghostbusters might bring. I mean in all essence he could have just called it Spectreslappers or Ghoulgapers or anything who gives a fuck but he didn’t because he wanted this media hype, this media war to rage on giving him all the free publicity he needed.

They must know they’re pissing off a whole generation of people with this and only the most benign and banal of beta males and women that show a passing fancy for the original films but are not really diehard fans are on the fence or like the idea. I mean Emma Stone knew which is why she turned down a role in the film, she knew there would be a shitstorm and she wanted to stay out of it, but the ever one note (hurr hurr I’m a fat chick, aint dat furnny hurr hurr I done fell over) Mellissa McCarthy was chomping at the bit to make some money off this heap of pure heresy.

I only wish Amy Schumer could have been in just to add that extra hint of crap on this enormous faecal cake.

But and this is the big one; they are still going to make a killing. A fucking killing, the only way this movie could flop is if they cast Adam Sandler as Slimer and even then most of his films make shitloads of money despite circling the toilet bowl for the last fifteen years. There’s just too much hype around for it not to make money. Now I’m not saying it’ll do well review wise, it’s most likely going to be roundly binned or at least just indifferently shelved but I’m talking about cold hard cash here.

So I almost stand in awe of the sheer majesty of this media puppetry, either Paul Feig is just an incredibly lucky idiot or an evil marketing genius. My final conclusion as someone who prides himself on freedom of speech I would never call for a boycott or have the movie banned, you can’t ban a movie just for being bad. And at the same time I want to see how bad it actually is, I want to see it destroyed by people who loved the original films.

But in the end this isn’t ‘our’ movie, it’s the current generations movie and maybe just maybe it’ll capture a glimpse of the magic of the original films packaged and processed by the greedy grave robbers at Sony (you know the people that did that fucking god awful original Spiderman series gak!). We don’t have to like it, but it doesn’t and can’t really take away from the originals so what harm does it really do? It’s fucked up but what can you really do about it? If at least one kid walks out of that movie and says ‘Wtf was that pile of crap?’ and then goes and digs in his parents vhs collection and doesn’t find 80’s porn but comes across an original Ghostbusters movie, it’s done its part.
I’ve decided after careful consideration to give zero fucks from here on out.

Check out more of my little strips about Jeffrey Dahmer.

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