Edge of the Axe (1988)

Edge of the Axe is not a very good slasher film. Released in 1988, it came out well after the slasher cycle had ended, and the movie industry had moved toward supernatural franchise slashers as per A Nightmare on Elm Street and the later Friday the 13th and Halloween films. Edge of the Axe is fixated on the early slasher tropes, but this is less a conscious throwback and more a case of being ridiculously late to the party. The film is altogether fairly retardataire, or backward. 

Edge of the Axe was an international production, with scenes shot in Spain and the States. It's actually hard to tell which scenes are in Northern California and which ones are in Madrid, which makes it feel as if the action isn't happening anywhere. The mix of European and American sensibilities is uncanny, and this is especially obvious in the dialogue. A preponderance of lines sound as if they were written by someone learning English, and doing a pretty good job of it—but still learning, nonetheless. Even more damningly on the writing side, the film's ending is somewhat muddled, but I'll say more about that in the post-spoiler addendum.

If Edge of the Axe does anything right, it can be seen in the kill scenes. These don't benefit from their good gore effects (which are poor), but rather from their brutal realism. The eponymous axe hits the victims with blunt force, not making a clean and seamless cut as per the standard slasher flick. It's rather ironic, given the film's incisive title. And on the subject of cuts, the camera does not cut away when the blade makes contact, contra most mainstream slashers. Rather, the viewer is subjected to an unedited sequence of the killer pummeling screaming women with an axe as blood gradually crops up on their clothing. 

With only one exception, the victims are all female, giving the film a decidedly misogynist vibe. This has not aged well, though it does afford Edge of the Axe a full-bodied meanspiritedness, marking it as archetypal exploitation fare. If axe bludgeonings and fairly unapologetic sexism are of interest to you, then check out Edge of the Axe. Otherwise, you're not missing much.

These next two paragraphs contain spoilers, as I'd like to add some further discussion of the ending of Edge of the Axe. 

In the final scene, the at-times sketchy computer-geek male lead bursts into the female love-interest's house (after he's been solidly teased as the killer). He then holds the love-interest captive and insists that it is she who is the killer, explaining that, via a proto-internet "central database," he has found out that she's spent time in a mental hospital on account of having "psycho amnesia." Ergo, she must be the one doing the killings. There is, of course, total disbelief from the love-interest, and she escapes her captor. Police show up as he's chasing after her, and, in unadulterated American form, gun down the nerd without questions asked. Obviously, the police, working on chauvinistic assumptions, presume that being a male pursuer is sufficient evidence to pronounce the lead geek guilty on sight. When the love-interest leaps into the embrace of her police rescuer, we then get a shot of her eyes turning maniacal. The film closes on this shot, making her guilt seem incontrovertible, at least for the viewer. 

But this viewer wasn't so convinced. The male lead still seems like the most plausible culprit, and not just because the rather petite female love-interest didn't match the body-type of the masked killer at all. Rather, time-period and technology factor heavily into my doubts. After all, I/we live in an era where the internet is not some esoteric niche pastime. Moreover, we've all seen how much misinformation is contained in computers. Indeed, entire political movements are based upon bad data. Since the male lead is an early adopter and the only civilian with an online presence in his rural American setting, wouldn't he be the most likely person to have planted the "fake news" in the terminal to convince the female love-interest that she was crazy? In the end, he certainly acted unhinged enough to seem capable of having orchestrated such a scheme. To me, Edge of the Axe contains a reminder that we can and do give computer nerds too much power, when many of them are morally dim basement dwellers who can't handle the fine-grain nuances of social responsibility or human relationships. That we have, since 1988, handed the keys to our society over to a caste of people easily agitated when forced to think outside the boundaries of binary, well, that is the real horror. Unlike the exploitative visuals in Edge of the Axe, this horror will burgeon through many decades to follow.

Why We Were Danforth

Over the course of the spring and summer of 2016, Charles Norwood and I co-wrote and self-published a novella entitled The Feminist Pimp. If nothing else, the story delivers on its title, charting the confused life of and bizarre intrigues surrounding its eponymous protagonist, one Mr. Beauvoir. Many of the scenes wrote themselves, and the book was a pleasure from the planning phase straight through to “publication.”

But there was a complication. If Big Chucky Norwood and Little Johnny Gosham have anything in common, it’s a bit of a Neo-Victorian streak. What that means is that any time one or both of us is having too much fun with something, we assume that surely it must exact some sort of existential price. This might be the reason we initially found each other in the hinterland of unpublished writers looking to collaborate (It might also be what led us to write about an industry where every pleasure has an agreed-upon price). Accordingly, we assumed with certitude that anything as fun as The Feminist Pimp was too good to be true.

More saliently, we were well aware of the volatile nature of the subject matter. There was, after all, in 2016, a gaining social justice movement that seemed to genuinely enjoy being offended. The oxymoron that is our main character—our hero—was a man who profited off women's bodies while at the same time championing women's rights. If The Feminist Pimp got any traction, we knew that it could be a powder keg of offensiveness. Any given underemployed arts baccalaureate with a social justice slant and a blog could have a field day cherry-picking the grittier scenes from The Feminist Pimp and labelling them as “problematic.” Truth be told, Chuck and I knew there were problematic elements—it was precisely these legitimate conflicts within the main character, as well as in his employees and his less-progressive competitors, that we wanted to milk for madcap comedy and social commentary.

But bloggers weren't our worst fear. We were most afraid of our own friends and coworkers, most of whom swing leftward politically (as do Chuck and I, by the way), and have never been afraid to call out a perceived injustice. Chuck and I feared the awkwardness of these potential call-outs, especially since they would probably involve injustices that we ourselves were very aware of. We just wanted to write a silly book predicated on these injustices and maybe make some money at it.

And so, before we ever put pen to paper, we decided upon writing The Feminist Pimp under a pen-name. Not two pen-names, but one for the both of us, which I suppose we assumed made us even less identifiable. The name would have to be androgynous, too, further veiling our identity and making the author's positionality less problematic than that of two white dudes. With these parameters set, we then spat out the most boring, lazy name could think of. And so Pat Danforth was born.

Once we set to work writing the actual manuscript, we made a pleasant discovery. The book wasn't ultimately that offensive. Oh, it had its questionable parts—for instance, Mr. Beauvoir's “I have a dream” speech. But what we found as we moved through the chapters is that the book was undeniably feminist. In fact, the last chapter includes an encouraging and concerted message about feminism with which I don't think any feminist would disagree. If Charles and I had doubted the strength of our feminism at the outset of the project (e.g. insofar as we could exploit such a potentially offensive idea), we didn't by the end. Having completed The Feminist Pimp, we the authors realized that we were feminists.

In July of 2016, The Feminist Pimp appeared exclusively on Amazon Kindle. Norwood and I didn't even have the collective cojones to send it out for legitimate publication. We figured the book's title alone would render it dead-on-arrival for most publishers, given the liberal sensibilities one assumes of small presses. Moreover, Chuck and I were still deluded enough to believe that the idea—the paradox of a feminist pimp—could sell itself. Needless to say, The Feminist Pimp sold very poorly. Nonetheless, its publication marked the beginning of a productive collaborative relationship between Chuck and me, which culminated in a few legitimate publications (see, for instance, "The Centaurist Manifesto.")

In the four years that followed, The Feminist Pimp was never fully out of mind for either of us. Even as Charles and I managed a few more publications to our credit, we still thought about Mr. Beauvoir. We were starting to get our due as writers, but Mr. Beauvoir wasn't getting his.

And as our careers were transforming with the passage of time, so too was the world. By November of 2016, the American people had elected Donald Trump as their president. Here was a man who had bragged on record about groping women without their consent. Here was a man who, as a sitting president, would go on to speak sympathetically about marauding hordes of neo-Nazis and would defend Confederate monuments tooth-and-nail. Here was a man who would teargas protesters to clear the way in front of church so that he could pose there with a Bible. Here is a man letting two pandemics—systemic racism and the coronavirus—go on unchecked. Trump was and is the totemic animal of a white America rediscovering its foundational bigotry. Trump is the apotheosis of a significant section of the American populace—Caucasian and androcentric—that has embraced this bigotry and all its attendant chauvinisms in full.

In short, our current reality looks far more offensive than anything in the fictional world of The Feminist Pimp.

The sorry state of western society has had its upsides, though. Leftists near and far from center, and even some conservatives, have seen that protest against systemic discrimination is not only in order but absolutely necessary. The most salient examples come from the protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that has subsequently become pervasive in popular culture. Similarly, the Me Too Movement has been making tangible progress in removing privileged predators from seats of power.

And so, the offended-by-everything social justice movement of 2016 has evolved and matured into more constructive forms of social protest. I think most of us would agree that the protests that occurred all across the United States in 2020 have been and are more productive and beneficial than, say, independent acts of bloggers crying foul about fiction writers’ choice of topics (to say nothing of throwaway comedic eBooks).

With that being the case, in this year synonymous with hindsight, Norwood and I took a good, long look at The Feminist Pimp once again. Why not put our names on it? Is it really anything to be overly ashamed of? In a world of pervert presidents propped up by racist voting bases, probably not. And there's also the matter of marketing to consider, too. While Norwood and Gosham aren't bestsellers by any stretch, the handful of “legitimate” publications we have to our credit makes us more of a commodity than dear Pat Danforth, god rest his or her or their soul.

In this spirit of better marketing, I'll go ahead and make the suggestion to you, the person reading this, that you head over to Amazon and check out The Feminist Pimp. By doing so, you can take up these vexing questions of whether or not the book is sexist, and if its authors are indeed feminists or actually the exact opposite. Read to the very end and decide for yourself.

***

The Feminist Pimp eBook is available here for less than a buck!

The House of Daniel

The House of Daniel must be the product of authorial autism, senility or some kind of neurological insult, if not all of the above. In a novel that manages to be both rigidly formulaic and wildly picaresque, bestselling speculative fiction senior statesman Harry Turtledove doesn't just turn his attention to baseball, but rather fixates obsessively upon it. 

The House of Daniel follows a small-town roustabout named Jack "Snake" Spivey as he grabs a spot on a travelling team of bearded ballplayers (based on the real-life "House of David" of yore), all in an effort to evade an unsavory employer. Spivey goes from town to town with the team, seeing large swaths of the American southwest and Pacific coast along the way. In literally every town the House of Daniel plays in, our narrator Spivey (or, better yet, our author Turtledove) provides the same constellation of details about the stop: the layout of the town, the dimensions of the ballpark and its seating capacity, and the uniforms the home team wears. This culminates in about a page or two of description covering the gameplay, which frequently involves the eventual use of a "brushback" pitch and some subsequent hostilities, if not an all-out brawl. After virtually every game, the opposing team's manager either approaches or is approached by the House of Daniel's player-manager and, with Spivey always in earshot, makes a comment to the effect of "you really beat our boys" or "our boys really beat you." 

Dozens of descriptions following this precise template make up the bulk of the book. It's almost as if an aging Turtledove was contractually obligated to provide a novel-length composition, and so he leaned on this formula to pound out the pages. It makes for monumentally uninspired writing and (unintentionally) comically repetitive reading as Turtledove's mind loops back to the same observations and incidents from town to town. Perhaps it is all intended as a commentary on the repetitive life of a Depression-era barnstorming ballplayer. 

But this is not your granddaddy's Depression-era, as it also features, as per standard Turtledove, a robust population of zombies, vampires, and other fantastical creatures, all of which have been more or less integrated into American society. These beings don't have much bearing on the plot, with the exception being a zombie-related incident that happens about 220 pages in and diverts the team bus—really the only juncture in the book that breaks from the template detailed above. Sometimes these creatures enable apparent attempts at comic relief. In the Pacific Northwest, for instance, the main character meets a bigfoot, and rattles off the following observation: "In spite of the long hair all over, that bigfoot was definitely he. His feet weren't the only thing big about him." Beyond coruscating insights of this sort, the monsters serve no purpose; their inclusion may very well have been contractually obligated so as to shoehorn this baseball novel into the genre most accustomed for Turtledove's devotees. 

It strikes this reviewer that the monsters and crypto-hominids might have been able to serve as a point of departure for commenting on racial strife in past and present-day America—including the outright racism of the main character early on in the book—but Turtledove shows no interest in doing this. He just wants to tell you about ballparks and brushbacks with monsters in the backdrop, over and over  and over again. Let's hope that The House of Daniel was compelled by commercial concerns and not cognitive degeneration. In either case, the resultant composition makes for a terrible read.

Super Baseball 2020

Super Baseball 2020 is SNK's futuristic reimagining of baseball. Released in North America in 1993 for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo by way of EA Sports, the game features some crucial rule changes for the “distant” future that the year 2020 represented at the time.

First off, in an effort to curb out-of-control power hitting, the dons of Super Baseball 2020's in-game universe have decreed that the left and right field fences should be colossally high, ensuring that homeruns can only be hit to straightaway center. In a similar effort to facilitate at least some degree of small-ball, foul territory has been limited to the space in front of first base and third base. Balls landing in the foul territory behind third and first as we presently know them are considered fair. The field itself has also been modified. At the warning track, for instance, there are “jump zones,” within which an outfielder can leap with some extra spring in his, her, or their step to take a stab at a fly ball. The field also changes over the course of the game. From the fifth inning onward, the Super Baseball rule book mandates that the field must play host to “crackers”—proximity mines that explode whenever someone ventures into their vicinity. Crackers can seriously debilitate a heedless fielder. Even the players themselves can change within game. Various sorts of plays lead to monetary awards, and in-game earnings can be used to upgrade a player.

Super Baseball 2020 also includes some significant changes around the culture of the game of baseball and, presumably, the society alongside which it has evolved. In consonance with the overarching sci-fi sensibilities, robots are among the players on the field and the umpires calling the plays. Even more fantastically, women appear on these big league rosters; in fact, there are entire teams of females, all of whom are identically blond and buxom and clad in short-shorts to boot. The crowd, meanwhile, appears to be made up of scattered robot parts. On the whole, these changes in rules and culture give Super Baseball 2020 a unique aesthetic, and provide a refreshing alternative to baseball in our current continuity, both past and present.

Indeed, Super Baseball 2020 looks drastically different from baseball in 1993 or in 2020 as it stands. Of course, baseball in present-continuity 2020 looks drastically different from baseball as it did in 1993, or even 2019, for that matter. As Super Baseball predicted, the volume of homeruns has increased dramatically in real-life 2020. With that has come an increase in strike outs. In an era of a deeply polarized politics, and a wholly politicized America often dictated by the whims of its leftist and rightist extremes, isn't it fitting that America's pastime has become about feast or famine, strike out or home run? Baseball has certainly seen rule changes. In an effort to speed up pace-of-play, Major League Baseball has mandated for the 2020 season that any given relief pitcher must face a minimum of three batters. More radically, to expedite extra innings, the tenth inning starts with a designated runner placed on second. And yet the biggest changes in Regular Baseball 2020 have been shaped around culture—not so much that of baseball itself, but rather that of a society racked by a respiratory virus and an unsatisfactory response thereto. With the coronavirus out of control in America, and with a staggering proportion of the American populace unwilling to believe the virus is real, baseball games are played in empty parks. In the absence of fans, enterprising PA guys pipe in 70 different situation-based crowd reactions. To fill the void, some parks have equipped the bleachers with cardboard cut-outs of people, which look a bit like the fans in N64-era baseball games, and are probably preferable to used-up robot parts. All told, actual Baseball in 2020 feels far more dystopian than Super Baseball 2020. At present, watching baseball sometimes feels like watching a video game.

If you're going to play video-game baseball, though, Super Baseball 2020 isn't a bad option. Its visual style and gameplay distinguish it from conventional baseball fare of its era. By comparison, 90s realist simulations like EA’s Tony La Russa Baseball look and feel dated. Super Baseball's futurism affords it some degree of timelessness. However, Super Baseball 2020 is not without its flaws. Chiefly, the game is somewhat buggy. For instance, if a base runner has touched a base, they cannot go back to their original base to avoid a force out (though this anomaly could be explained away as another rule change of the future). More broadly, Super Baseball 2020 suffers from pace-of-play issues of its own. The amount of innings in a game is non-adjustable, and playing a complete game usually takes over 20 minutes. “Futuristic” does not, in this dispensation, mean “streamlined” or “speedy.” And when pitted against other futuristic baseball games, Super Baseball actually pales. Inevitably, Super Baseball prompts comparisons to Base Wars, Konami's 1991 NES release that features all-robot squads playing a fairly conventional version of baseball. There's one important difference, however: force plays in Base Wars occasion one-on-one duels between baseman and baserunner robots. On account of this innovation, as well as overall speedier gameplay, Base Wars is a more enjoyable experience than Super Baseball 2020. 

All that being said, Super Baseball 2020 is still a fine game, and it will endure beyond its eponymous year in the history of both video games and baseball. Truth be told, Major League Baseball in our present continuity could learn a thing or two from Super Baseball. Mandatory green monsters in left and right in every stadium would turn the focus back to something other than homeruns (and the strike-outs that unfettered fence-swinging makes commonplace). The MLB has already started looking into the use of robot umps. It still seems like it will be awhile before baseball culture, or the androcentric American culture that sustains it, will consider the possibility of female players. That said, the San Francisco Giants just recently hired Sacramento State's softball standout Alyssa Nakken as their first-base coach. This is an important first step for women in the MLB. Your correspondent would like to believe we’ll see women on a major-league baseball field before we see proximity mines. Of course, this is America we’re talking about, so you can never count out the tyranny of crackers.