THE COLDEST WAR – PART ONE:
an illustrated script
— James T. Hong
Sword and the Sorceress
— Damon Packard and Chadwick Nelson
Dave Cox interviews Sam Green
— David Cox
Interview with Sylvia Schedelbauer: towards a cinema of personal narrative
— Molly Hankwitz
On the System of the “Suture” in Cinema
— J.M. Magrini
10 Feb 2006
(sequel to the 1982 motion picture Sword and the Sorcerer)
Apple : Fairuza Balk
Bloodsoak : David Thewlis
Orb : Charlotte Rampling
Drunkoth : Rutger Hauer
Vashkiri : Rosanna Arquette
King Ponderer : Max Von Sydow
King Klauschmitt : Jurgen Prochnow
Pearlwing : Angelina Jolie
The world was supposed to end in 1983 – but instead we continued, reality and creativity was not meant to reach this point... everything was used up, the limits reached. Turning in circles, cannibalizing themselves for even a modicum of inspiration, the film and music industries stopped producing anything of relative meaning and therefore the people’s hope and lives began to wander down a very sterile path ... no more inspiration, no genuine ambition, no more real excitement, as only the deluded disagree and seem to be unaware that they are victims – an “Experiencing a Different Reality” manipulation campaign. They are “Parallel Walkers,” experiencing a slightly different version of reality.
Suddenly – the film reel breaks and in Des Moines and Baton Rouge, the carbohydrate freaks revolt ... thick vascular ankles supporting grotesque, obese body frames shamble up a mild incline to the various lobbies shouting incomprehensible obscenities and then the sheer pandemonium erupts into the parking lots and the shops where nothing but cheese, crackers, crumbled chocolate, stale Halavah bars and moldy bread are available for consumption.
The enfeebled masses remain confused since no-one can agree on which is the “one true reality,” oblivious to the dilemma of why so many are experiencing different realities. Who is controlling and influencing these perspectives? Cultures are polarized to the point of sheer confusion on all ends, which brings us to the present reality, at the end of the alley, facing an immense wall ... nothing left; the human spirit dead.
Everyone is afflicted with a form of viral constipation, all the laxatives worldwide are sold out, off the shelves, cannot be reproduced, formulas lost or deleted. Fruit and prune crops have been wiped out and the maddening pace of constipation continues, yet people continue to eat nothing but dry crackers, cheese, and peanut butter. Water shortages, thick dry moldy toast, zero fiber, zero fruit, toilets not flushing, people getting fatter and sicker and keeling over with exploded colons, riddled with parasites.
These people are cramming into the multiplex in a vain attempt to avoid thinking about intestinal discomfort, each groaning and bloated, complaining about the lack of substance in films today. They stand in strangely muted silence at concession stands, only the sounds of groaning and somber orders for dry oyster crackers or petrified pound cake (everything is stale and hard as a brick) An oddly depressing tableau.
Suddenly, a lighthearted and frothy film about young lesbian elves is projected onto the screen, and the congealed, sweaty masses seem to calm down a bit. They are somehow lulled into a false sense of comfort when suddenly, in the film, a group of topless lesbian elves are eating enormous quantities of mangos and papayas and dripping fruit pulp onto their pert pink nipples, lapping it up with tremendous hunger.
At the sight of so much fiber and digestible foodstuffs the crowd in an angry surging uproar throw up their cheese, crackers, and moldy bread and storm out of the auditorium, trampling the vest-wearing minimum-wage slaves.
We absorb into the realm of this projected film, the sequel to Sword and the Sorcerer ... the Sword and Sorceress.
King Klauschmitt is sitting in his meditation chambers, the royal buttocks softly supported by gelatinous pillows. He too munches on supple fruit and fibrous foodstuffs. Pearlwing, the elfin archer, steps up to him, defiant, and begins to recite a poem from the distant past. The poem has relevance because it is an omen of bad tidings, and it relates to the polarity shift that occurred in 1983. She is trying to tell him that another shift is occurring and that they all need to pay more attention to the signs.
She mentions Queen Orb and her atmospheric telecast of bad movies from the late 80’s and early 90’s and how this is sending the feeble masses into an earlier grave. Klauschmitt is nauseated by what he hears. Nauseated but fascinated.
It is here we learn this world is in fact the near-distant future of scattered survivors, forced to return to the old ways of living. The first surviving clans had only costumes left over from an un-made sword and sorcery film in an underground wardrobe bunker to adorn and keep warm in the winters. They eventually adopted this way of life.
Among the survivors are an odd assortment of aged actors who find an ironic future of life imitating art. Lee Horsley, from the 80’s TV show Matt Lincoln, also played “Talon” in Sword & the Sorcerer, now reluctantly fallen into the real life role of his onscreen character.
Glenda Jackson, former actress then Parliament and secret member of The Illuminati (cleverly concealed as Grizedale Arts Board members in the Cumbria region), an embittered Sorceress Queen named “Orb” in this new world. Feeling remorse she now wishes to redeem herself by reconstructing a Space Disco Dance auditorium in her Dominion.
Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who somehow survived the viral apocalypse by stashing a crop of linseeds, found a tattered Knights outfit in the costume bunker and started the first brew of home-made ales. Now has become known as Drunkoth, inebriated errant Knight inadvertently impervious to harm.
Tinkling with swords and metal trinkets, Drunkoth constantly makes passes at a feisty and hyper-irascible Rosanna Arquette, who has become known as Vashkiri, adopted niece to King Ponderer, formerly known as the actor Max von Sydow.
The drugged out, nose-pierced, former Hollywood occult store owner/actress Fairuza Balk looking feral, haggard, and scarred has donned elf-ears and become the sword wielding elf “Apple.” She has a wide range of talents and tastes, which flicker and change with the phases of the moon. Experimentally bisexual, awash in the daydreams of an accelerated youth, she is both playful and morbidly obtuse.
Nicol Williamson, retired British actor who played Merlin in John Boorman’s Excalibur also finds his way into the troupe and stubbornly assumes a leadership position trying to restore order among the survivors.
Suddenly – the film reel breaks and in Des Moines and Baton Rouge, the carbohydrate freaks revolt ... thick vascular ankles supporting grotesque, obese body frames shamble up a mild incline to the various lobbies shouting incomprehensible obscenities and then the sheer pandemonium erupts into the parking lots and the shops where nothing but cheese, crackers, crumbled chocolate, stale Halavah bars and moldy bread are available for consumption.
There is an investigation on FOX News about where this film, this anomaly originally emerged, who funded it, which studio had the temerity to release it, the fragile minds diseased by it, and all the available fruit eaten onscreen; where on God’s green earth did that come from? The investigation keeps bringing up suspicious mention of Grizedale Arts in the UK and it’s reclusive CEO Adam Sutherland hiding out in the secret mines of the Cumbria region.
How is it possible? There are shortages!!! Palatable fruit is extinct!!! It can’t exist! One particularly obese and moribund FOX executive is primarily concerned about the bran muffins shown in the trailer for this mystery movie ... where did they come from?
With America and Britain constipated and on the verge of moral bankruptcy; all the sex and violence on TV is OK but show some fruit or a bran muffin and all hell breaks loose...
As the Chemtrail program continues daily, so blatant now they leave brightly glowing, oily multi-coloured viscous shapes in the sky, yet nobody cares. Nobody cares that they are being slowly toxified, aluminumated, pseudomonous florensens introduced into their arteries and lungs because the gauntly grotesque Paris Hilton is on TV and she is breaking up with somebody semi-famous or screwing someone vaguely anonymous or talking about all the shopping for fruit in foreign countries she is going to do because she has the Good-Citizen-Speedpass and can afford to get on any flight she wants with Kathy Lee and all the starving children in Indiana can’t keep her from shopping for alligator shoes in what remains of New Orleans.
Our dyslexic leader is on TV and he is funding a fund for finding the fiber in foreign films and fenestrating the funders ad infinitum.
We cannot escape this daily cesspit of bedraggled infotainment nonsense dispensed without regard to the bloated and cramping masses stunned into mute silence before their widescreen video monitors plastered on the walls of their bland unpaid-for apartments.
Everyone is extremely muddled and un-energetic, a bloated lead weight in their bowels, the sounds of groaning and shifting their weight in stained sweatpants and jogging suit-combos.
But they never jog or do exercise of any kind. Red, puffy-faced men standing at newsstands, dripping perspiration On the mottled pages of Barely 18 and Swank. The huddled muddled mass mindset is seething with constipated frustration, unable to do anything but munch on stale oyster crackers and thick bready dry mexican pastries, no liquids available other than pasty gravy and chunky meat sauces. But instead of help or relief The Govt has dispatched teams of “Perversity Patrols” trawling the internet for child predators, arresting droves for kiddie porn on the computer and tailing the red puffy faces at newsstands.
Sexual desire to any degree for any female under the age of 18 is now the most heinous and enforced crime in the world (following the footsteps of America) Instant life in prison with no parole. All book and film versions of Orwell’s 1984 are contraband and haunting images of Richard Burton’s placid face holding up his hand “how many fingers Winston ...” from bootlegged DVD copies now float about.
It is a hideous time. What caused the dreamy creative and idealistic 60’s and 70’s to shift into the 80’s and 90’s and freeze frame from there on? And why don’t people seem to be aware of what is happening? One scientist (Professor David Icke) is working on this puzzle, meticulously analyzing the reasons. A man later to be known as King Ponderer in our projected elfin adventure, sequel to all fantasy sequels, strange window into the apocalyptic future. He soon discovers that people are living in a ‘Dead Zone’, as once written in the Stephen King story. A Time that should not be.
2007 will always be remembered as the year of Total Collapse ... people stubbornly refusing to face the truth ... who don’t want to give up their little petty concerns and acknowledge what is really going on.
Martial Law. Food Riots. The collapse of the Auto Industry–the Travel Industry–the Housing Market–the Stock Market. Water taps shut off. Cash outlawed. Republic Credits. Movies have become part of an intentional dumbing-down campaign to not give hope, to not give inspiration or ideas, to only proffer a couple of misspent hours in an airless box, contemplating the sheer crapitude thrust before them for consumption ... but at an expense.
Sequels to sequels or remakes of remakes. Besieged by a barrage of Advertisements for useless products, children drinking bone-softening carbonated corn-syrups – fattening the masses for the stupid slaughter they all hope will never come... Own it today on DVD.
Orb comes from this time, an Illuminati-appointed studio executive, tasked with approving only the worst ideas, the most half-baked concepts, the most ridiculous exercises in casting ... it was her mission to deliberately undermine what was once a thriving creative atmosphere into one of massive and corrupted compromise. She would receive memos from the higher-ups that would demand only the most hideously pointless films be made. Her appointment to this post occurred in that most foul year of our lord, 1988.
From that year on things were frozen, from the day in early November when George H.W. Bush was elected president and John Carpenter’s They Live was released. These two events announced the coming of the second, and darkest dark age ... the age of nothing happening nothing improving nothing interesting to do but sit in zombified stupefied silence watching CSI or Nip/Tuck or CNN.
The Olsen Twins The OJ Case The Kobe Bryant rape trial the Michael Jackson molestation case Jon Benet Ramsey the funeral of Ronald Reagan, the funeral of Pope John Paul or the Robert Blake murder trial the Gary Coleman bankruptcy fiasco or American Idol and Lost and Ben Affleck and J. Lo and Janet Jackson’s nipple and Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie and nothing but bad Sandra Bullock/Reese Witherspoon Comedy remakes.
This is utterly catatonically stupefying the masses into a non- analytical, not-critical-thinking mind frame and it continues to bludgeon our senses into submission. Nobody of intelligence and insight can believe what is going on, what we are told is going on and what is really going on. None of it makes any logical sense.
Unless ... You look beneath the blanket of hope to see the creepy- crawlies eating away, fiber by fiber all that we know and love, sugarcoating the pain, candy-coating the rot, pharmaceutically numbing the knowledge that we are divine beings robbed of our ability to live for ourselves.
The lies of BushFraud; the lies of the 2000 election or installment of the idiot son of BushSenior, reptilian prince of an ancient bloodline; the fraudulent cataclysm-engineered event on 9/11, Illuminati fingerprints all over' the systematic silencing and assassinations of David Icke, Alex Jones, and Richard Hoagland; and the sheer stupidity of the American People in swallowing what physics cannot in nature produce – the list is endless, the lies suffocating. What then, shall we do?
Somehow through the back alleys we find ourselves back in a darkened cinema filled with the groaning constipated – and return to the onscreen drama, our Sword and the Sorceress, Hawk the Slayer II, Excalibur Revisited, through the realm of The NeverEnding Story.
Drunkoth awakes from his stupor. Clumsily standing, knocking over urns of urine, he clambers down the stairway to the pestilent outdoor eating arenas.
Foul pig meat in troughs, slicing eyeballs and gouts of arterial spray erupt into the frigid air while clotted groups of skeletal people huddle amidst the gruesome carnage with wooden bowls empty and glazed with a tint of mucous.
The food lines are filling up with malcontents, starving for scraps in the wilderness. There is no hygiene whatsoever. Animals skinned and slaughtered, great slabs of warm fetid meat slapped noisily onto carving tables, the shrieks of the mutilated, the howls of the hungry, a terrible horrible awfulness... Drunkoth pays no mind to meat, only ale and bread sustain him, and the loins of ripe young brain-damaged girls that offer their supple thighs for a sip of a pint.
Klauschmitt lives in a perpetual late 70’s early 80’s haze of optimistic narcissism. For him, 1983 never really ended. His kingdom is nestled in a valley in what used to be part of the Scottish Highlands. It is protected on all sides by tall peaks and is very remote. Sentries and guards are posted at all corners, shooting blow darts at occasional foraging malingerers, knocking them into a psychedelic stupor ... they merely wander off muttering to themselves, entranced by odd shapes and colors.
One of the guards, a burly transvestite – fruity yet brutish Viking named Betsy – notices Apple’s approach up a slender mountain trail ... notices that she is alone, but followed at a discreet distance by a tortured cripple. This is Bloodsoak, played by David Thewlis.
Betsy is an expert at reading auras and can tell that Apple is exceptional in every way and that the cripple is a worthless miscreant offering nothing other than certain physical endowments.
The fruity Viking guard tries to seduce the cripple (Bloodsoak, assistant to Orb) upon his approach.
... vascular ankles supporting grotesque obese body-frames shamble into the lobby complaining like plump babies, flesh rippling on cherubic faces. The film starts up again and they settle down immediately, like babies getting their bottle. We fall back into the film. Somehow, it seems the reels got mixed up and now reel one is showing the opening of the film.
This causes some temporary groans of confusion mixed with physical discomfort but they soon accept it.
Susan Tyrell (Wizards) is narrating the opening. Despair and retribution are everywhere, people maddened, stumbling, groping blindly in the dark for some shred of hope or dignity but nothing is Left of What Was. The water is soiled; brain-damaged children are the norm, women have become frenzied, flagellant sex-beasts raping unwilling and impotent men at random.
Into this new and horrific dark-ages comes hurling a harbinger of doom.. Queen Orb, stooped, devious, a wizened libertine hell-bent on Destruction and peevishness.
Stumbling along beside her is Count Bloodsoak, a decadent miscreant of the highest order – a foul-tempered and demented seer, his rotted teeth and decayed flapping gum-tissues reek of stomach-acids long-since disconnected from his putrid bowels, a furnace of stench and pestilence.
The camera pans past some ramshackle market stalls; a congealed conundrum of manure, hay, and forgotten and useless remnants of what once was.
A pack of hellish whore-beasts descend on Bloodsoak, fresh meat for the fornicating, when Queen Orb sticks out her mangled claw and with a savage spell renders them bull-dykes.
Bloodsoak steps lightly over the mass of newly-christened however unhygienic lesbian converts and continues in his sycophantic diatribe extolling the virtues of the under-aged and nubile though irreparably brain-damaged young girls staring at him with blank expressionless eyes and slack, exposed dugs. Orb is unfazed by her assistants apparent perversities and outlines in stunning detail her plans for conquest of this shattered and undeniably hopeless realm.
We cut to the frolics of a young elfin girl, sensuously grasping the hardened tube of her painted blowgun, felching darts into the moist hides of reptilian lazyboars. Her uncle, a man of some former importance in the world of high finance, watches with the detached gaze of the terminally distracted – lost in some penumbral daydream, absently stroking strands of his soft, wispy beard, which is covered in oatmeal.
The elfin girl is named Apple. Dark hair, thick lashes, green piercing eyes. She is deeply aware of the lust she inspires in cripples and old men, but has found no-one in which her predatory interests lie.
The myth of elves came from an ancient Lemurian epoch, where breeding programs initiated by extraterrestrials from the heavily karmic and perverse Orion system experimented with the Blonde Lyran Women and the darker, more reflexively earthy terrestrial males – from these times and breeding programs were born the race of Elves.
Few survived, fewer prospered. Now, in this dark new age, we have come again full circle and very few remember what was....
The high-elfin girls were terrifically beautiful and promiscuous, aware of their fantastic power over men, rampant masturbators, their remarkable sex-drives tempered and tamed by no man.
Apple was once such as these, the last of her kind. Her uncle however, is limp and disinterested, now merely pondering and peeling oranges.
He calls to her. She puts down her painted blowgun and ambles over amiably ... he has a task for her.
To go into the insane village of Ambleside and find out everything about Queen Orb and her disgusting rabble.
Stealthily, under the cover of darkness, Apple inserts herself into a makeshift tavern, where the fermented remains of turnips are distilled into a noxious, however intoxicating brew, greedily consumed by the brutish, asexual men populating the area.
This is where we are introduced to the character of Drunkoth, Pleasantly staggering on a pile of mucousy turnip rinds, he urinates on the upturned face of a passed-out clergyman, or rather, a pathetic representation of one.
Apples dewy eyes lock onto him and there is just some intangible “something” about Drunkoth which attracts her.
He stumbles over and extends his hand, which is oddly clean and manicured. This sets Apple’s pulse racing, as elfin girls are immaculately bathed in purest water; random filth unable to touch them – she takes his hand and an odd discharge of psycho-kinetic energy passes between them – and in that brief moment their fate together has been extracted..
Her thick nipples visibly harden beneath her tunic; this does not pass unnoticed by the crowd gathering and muttering around them.
She senses danger and begins to perform a lewd ballet, stepping up onto a crude table and exposing her supple thighs and crisp ankles; slowly, and teasingly turning in every conceivable direction so the bleary, reprobate visages can get a better glimpse of remarkable elfin body parts.
Some hideous regurgitated belching and soft wet noises tremulate, the now seldom-aroused and turnip-pickled men undulate and move in a strange visual cacophony.
Her effect is tangible, eerie, and frighteningly real. Drunkoth slowly realizes what is happening and strongly urges her to relent, to get out now before something uncontrollable is let loose on the mud-caked streets of this ramshackle town.
At this same time, deep in her dungeon, Orb is contemplating the construction of her Space Disco Auditorium, to be built with discarded Atlantean energy sources recently dredged up from the seafloor by an apparatus built by NASA before the Pole Shift Cataclysm – this is where she worked, in psy-ops and this is now what sheremembers in detailed flashback....
The sun superheated beyond all reckoning; blackened faces crying out in terror, power-outages, water shortages, martial-law, no discernable order, the sun in the sky, frozen for six days straight, starvation, earthquakes, insanity, infighting among the Elites for control of the bunker systems and underground cities, rebellion from the Zetas, the Greys, the Annunaki Reptoids down beneath New Mexico, scattered pirate radio broadcasts, alerts, random acts of gunfire and executions in the crumbling cities, panic and mobs and the lurching backwards rotation of the planet, a planet gripped in seismic rift, seizures, mudslides and thousand-mile-an-hour windstorms whipping up the dust and debris for weeks on end.
She comes out of her reverie to discover Bloodsoak, staring raptly into his seer-stone, staring with deranged ferocity at a young elfin girl, approaching their haunted castle keep.
His face betrays his naked lust and twisted desire for this girl, he must have her – his palsied hands are shaking uncontrollably — he drops the seer-stone and it shatters into glittering fragments at his feet.
Orb is staring in mute fascination at a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century DVD box-set which, amazingly, survived the cataclysm and was retrieved from the ruins of the Virgin Megastore by one of her former slaves on a retrieval mission some nine weeks earlier – their castle and these environs occupy the realm of Barrow in Furness at the old Abby.
Soon it begins to rain and Apple’s tunic becomes brazenly transparent. Not that she minds.
It is from recent playback of the Buck Rogers DVD set that we glean a fragment of Queen Orb’s plan for dominion over this shattered world ... to create some fantastic reconstruction of the late 1970’s in the hope of resurrecting the sexual dynamics of the Carter-era ... braless women humping flaccid men in polyester action suits and roller-skating harlequins in satin spandex crotch-stretch pants.
She knows deep inside its no use, the men in this realm are patently useless, but somehow, with misguided hope and the fervent need to bring some happiness to the mordant gloom outside, Bloodsoak suspects that somewhere rooted in the great negative aspects of his natal chart lies the secret to unlocking unlimited power ... some vast uncharted space- time continuum which can be summoned up and grossly misused.
Queen Orb straps herself into a serpentine injection module, tubes and needles probing every orifice, lovingly piercing sensitive flesh, sending waves of synthetic pleasure coursing through her newly-enabled veins, processing thought waves into form, into plans for domination from this psychedelic haze she now often finds herself in.
Apple is now stripping off her rain-soaked tunic, freeing her ample bosom. Drunkoth stares in mute fascination, approaches and reaches out his scarred and hardened hands to touch the immense, swelling, puckered aureole.
Apple shudders in anticipation. A horrific shriek rips through the atmosphere as the crystal shard that Bloodsoak has summoned comes meteorically crashing through the roof of the Castle Keep and into a vaporous pool of viscous muck.
This interrupts Apple’s seduction. Drunkoth staggers into a crypt of desiccated mummies.
The stench is unbearable. Apple follows tentatively as torchlight ahead seems to beckon. They are able to look down and observe Bloodsoak muttering incomprehensible gibberish to the now throbbing crystal, which hums in some stilted rhythm.
Queen Orb unstraps herself from the injection module and limps feebly forward to stare at his revolving amethyst shard. It is unbearably luminous and seems almost liquid.
Bloodsoak claims it will produce unlimited energy for their morbid experiments and would surely be able to manifest into any shape or form desired.
Apple flops down on the sodden crypt soil and begins to masturbate feverishly ... the livid vibrations are somehow attuning to her sexual frequency which amplifies out into the outlying regions.
The hellish whore-beasts go into total overdrive and the once limp and pathetic men develop erections formerly unheard of ... there is an inconceivable amount of copulation going on...
King Klauschmitt is seated on his pincushion, twirling some red licorice between his toes. He is craving chocolate pudding. Calls out to his priest. Send the pudding.
Bloodsoak, like Orb, has become obsessed with dredging up trinkets and tidbits from the past. On one of his foraging trips to the outlying regions he stumbled upon the rotted remains of a Virgin Megastore, buried deep in the putrid earth. He managed to bring back a load of video and music software for Orb to download and enjoy (along with her daily synthemesc injections) ... they become particularly fascinated with the films of Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg as well as a mangled but workable copy of Orson Welles’ F for Fake.
Orb is soothed by Welles sonorous voice and it lulls her to sleep often ... this produces a series of psychic dreamwaves which somehow permeate the crystal shard and send out these messages from the past to the shattered and maddened masses huddled around their dung-fires and mangled bone-huts. Their frenzied, flagellant ways seem to subside and a calm settles in.
Bloodsoak manages to find a way to project images and films from the past into a sky-beacon which hovers unobtrusively over the crappy little villages.
We return to Apple, who in truth is the main character. She continues to throw herself unceremoniously upon Drunkoth, who pays her no mind. She decides to walk around his grungy cabin completely nude but this has no effect on him. She squats on his fur-covered table and urinates into a frothy mug of ale. He doesn’t notice.
Frustrated, she locks herself up in the wine cellar and masturbates intensely with his musty bottles of sour champagne. Drunkoth passes out. Hears nothing.
Bloodsoak is creeping around outside and decides to peer through the moth-eaten curtains of Drunkoth’s scroungy abode when Apple senses him during what must be her sixteenth orgasm and bursts through the cellar door, sweaty, damp, dung-covered and feral, grabs his hand and shoves it into her crotch.
Bloodsoak responds by lurching forward and trying in vain to keep from ejaculating spontaneously. His face scrunched up in tearful agony, he sheepishly retreats into shadow.
Apple is left wanting. Standing in the freezing rain, washed clean, looking up at the stars, she begins to understand. Orson Welles’ soothing voice calls to her and she wanders off, arms outstretched in supplication, across the mud-strewn streets.
Queen Orb is preparing another injection when Bloodsoak bursts in, faintly embarrassed and asks her for a loan. Needs to buy some nice clothes. Has a date. Pretty girl. Walks around naked. Might need some clothes too.
Orb is too narcotisized to be baffled properly, so she acquiesces, and offers a clawful of gold from an enormous box beneath her throne.
Bloodsoak finds himself in a decrepit Wal-Mart and cannot adjust the lighting conditions to his liking. The feeble candle just isn’t cutting it. Notices some cheap Hawaiian shirts and tries a few on, his mangled paralytic arm just barely jutting through a short rayon sleeve. Decides that this is adequate and manages to stumble out. Has come to the conclusion that Apple looks best naked.
Apple has wandered back to the castle of King Ponderer, asking advice. Ponderer suggests she seek out his brother, King Klauschmitt, in his day-glow happyland, stoned on mushrooms and other natural psychedelics.
It is here (on Ponderer’s Kingdom) she crosses paths with her long missing human friend Vashkiri (Ione Skye), and the once childhood friends prance off into the Rainforest in sensual magical delight.
Pearlwing, the elfin archer, manages to find and join them, and the three of them lose control of their fragile libido in hyper-sexual ecstasy. Warmed by fuzzy fireflies, caressed by moving bush-beds.
At this point, Apple comes to realize this is a film that can never be made, an early rough draft submission of an (almost nearly senseless and preposterous) story treatment for an impossible Grizedale Film project by a human being named Damon Packard (and his co-writer Chadwick Nelson) A project which never stood a chance in hell for funding. She and her companions are merely living out the words as read by the reader of this discarded yet archived treatment stashed in a folder merely marked
“All work is documented and archived as part of the Grizedale Arts programme and may be drawn upon for future publications, conferences or, events.”
Returning to Ponderer’s Chamber with Vashkiri and Pearlwing at her side, she ruefully relays her findings to Ponderer, telling the whole story of this mysterious human filmmaker Packard, his inability to write a sensible, sensitive, and subtle story satisfying enough for his own salient tastes.
A glint of curiosity and wisdom in the kings eye opens him up, after an eternity of gloomy silence or merely uttering the words “I must ponder this” he refers to a book called The NeverEnding Story by Michael Ende, whose name in itself is a strange joke of the universe since it is a story about a story with no “Ende,” “The Nothing” a metaphor for the finite in a realm of infinity.
He dispenses wisdom of how all creativity is a mirror within a mirror, a reflection reflecting itself like Reflections of Evil, within the whole of the universe, or some such. A dry endless lecture which bores us to death and takes us back to the beginning of the circle, caught in an endless loop in the age of emptiness.
www.reflectionsofevil.com◊