#than even Lorenz which is just... laughable at that point honestly

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

Anon with the "GW not bad for Faerghus" ask. I couldn't read your full response bc your other blog is private but yes, there are people who say that the Kingdom is not in a bad position. Mostly those who think Claude's "scheme" will force Edelgard to end the war bc he could ally with the "still strong" Kingdom to crush her if she didn't, and that GW is some kind of "golden ending" for the three nations. Some even argue that Claude freed Faerghus/Dimitri from the Church's chains - or whatever.

I don't know if you saw my post where I mentioned you should be able to read it now, but if you didn't you should still be able to. I think I switched off the setting for that because I didn't realize it would prevent you from seeing the whole ask. :o

That's wild to hear though that people think the Kingdom isn’t in a bad position. They've lost a lot of military power regardless of whether or not they lose influence. Like I mentioned in the previous ask, it's basically up to Claude whether or not they retain their influence (regardless of what Petra wants in GW or what she thinks she knows about Fodlan lol). If they do, they still have no military might. If Sreng invades they're fucked if Claude doesn't treat them like a vassal state of Leicester and help them under the pretext that Faerghus is now part of Leicester.

In other words, they’re at best a vassal state and otherwise left alone, and at worst they’re left to rot.

Technically, Claude could try to get them to help him fight against the Empire, sure, but they won’t have the military might to help him very much, and like I mentioned in the last ask, the chances of it working are slim. Gautier won’t help and I can say that with pretty much full certainty, and if Gautier won’t help then Fraldarius probably won’t either (remember, it’s Felix who makes the final decisions now and not Rodrigue, so if Felix sees Sylvain is still upset about his father and won’t help the Alliance because of what they did, Felix won’t help them either. Felix is extremely emotional about his friends - especially his childhood friends. If you fuck with them then he’s going to fuck with you).

So now, Claude can either decide to try to force them to help, which would invoke another fight between him and Faerghus and cause more deaths, or he’ll just have to accept that he’s not getting help/a lot of help from Faerghus (I detailed it more in the other ask, so hopefully you can access the rest of it now!).

Post GW, Faerghus won’t be helping anyone in a war, I can tell you that. It’d take everything they had to keep Sreng out and to fix any damages from the Alliance’s attack. Even if Claude called on them, they just... couldn’t help.

Unfortunately even in GW they imply that Dimitri is “freed” of the Church, so of course most people take that at face value and don’t look any deeper than what’s told to them. Dimitri isn’t really free or not free of the Church. He was never in a situation where he was being controlled by them. They’re on friendly terms, but that’s really it. Rhea doesn’t tell Dimitri what to do or how to run Faerghus. It’s just that the people there are very devout because of their good relations with the Church and because Rhea helps Faerghus when they need help. It’s give and take for them just like any political situation. Faerghus isn’t in a bad position because they’re around. They’ve only really benefitted from the Church if anything, because Rhea doesn’t personally involve herself with their political decisions.

The whole “we have to free Dimitri from them” thing sounded more to me like Claude needing to find something “good” to hang onto to excuse himself for making those choices. As it was he was grasping at straws to justify their invasion to begin with. He already didn’t have a good pretext for attacking them. Saying “we’re freeing you” is like... his lowkey way of saying he needs to make himself feel better about it, because Dimitri didn’t need his or anyone’s help to begin with. If they were left alone, Faerghus would’ve been fine. Edelgard in GW is struggling on both sides of the war, so if Faerghus hadn’t been attacked by the Alliance, I can guarantee the Empire would’ve just lost.

Really, if Claude teamed up with the Kingdom in the first place and took down the Empire, they would’ve spared themselves more lives and bloodshed in the long run. Claude caused even more battles to happen and got more innocent people killed. I think by the end of the game he did figure out that he made the wrong decisions, but by then it was too late and he couldn’t take back what he did so he needed to find ways to justify all of it to himself.

I just wish they actually came out and said that though instead of running around it in circles while trying to make us believe he actually believes that the Kingdom was just better off without the Church. They weren’t doing badly with the Church involved or not involved. It was the invasion that hurt them. If Claude skipped around Fhirdiad and killed Rhea, regardless of plot or context or anything, just like, imagine he didn’t invade Faerghus and they just passed through and killed Rhea, then Faerghus’ situation might get a little more complicated for inheritance, but I think just with Dimitri’s temperament that they’d be able to stave off any legitimacy issues pretty quick. That is, people liked him in power so the populace would still be in favor of having him as king whether the Church was there or not. Rodrigue was well liked, so he’d be a perfect public figure to calm down any potential anxiety and worry with the loss of the Church. They could’ve actually made it without the Church, but it was mostly the invasion that really hurt the country and dug them into a hole for the future.

[mst3kproject]

Monster from Green Hell

Monster from Green Hell is a Giant Atomic Insect movie – I'm pretty sure that alone makes it MST3K eligible, but there are also some less-than-illustrious names involved.  Although the film was surprisingly not directed by Bert I. Gordon,  it was produced by Al Zimbalist, whose name you may remember reading in the opening credits of Robot Monster. Oooh, and remember Pepe the Latino-Transylvanian janitor from I Was a Teenage Werewolf? Actor Vladimir Sokoloff is in this, too, playing Dr. Lorenz the missionary!  Scared yet?

The opening narration explains to us that before mankind can venture into space, he must find out what exposure to cosmic radiation will do to a life form.  To this end, Dr. Brady and his colleage Dr. Morgan have collected an apparently random assortment of life forms and are launching them into space on board stock rocket footage (some of which I'm pretty sure we've seen before, perhaps in King Dinosaur). One of the rockets goes off-course and comes back to Earth in central Africa.  Six months later, there is panic in the area – although Dr. Lorenz dismisses the stories of 'Green Hell' as some kind of superstition, in the very next scene we see animals at a watering hole being terrorized by a giant mutated bug!

The bugs are hilarious. How do I even describe these things?  They're supposed to be mutant wasps but they look kind of like an ant drawn by a seven-year-old with a microscope, with a bee's wings and a lobster's claws attached just for fun.  They have nostrils. They buzz constantly even though they never fly, their size varies from 'horse' to 'house' depending on the shot, and the film-makers seem a little unclear on which end of the wasp has the stinger in it. The puppets are detailed enough that they would honestly be kind of impressive if they weren't so silly-looking, and watching them eat hapless extras is a real hoot.  At this point the audience settles back with a smile, figuring this movie is going to be awesome.

Then it pulls the rug out from under us.  Rather than delving directly into the scientist's quest to destroy the monsters of Green Hell, we follow them through Padding Hell on the way.  After speaking to a territorial agent who looks weirdly like Josef Stalin, Brady and Morgan sit around in a hotel for a week and then set off on a month-long trek across the stock footage savannah. On the way they are menaced by natives, nearly die of thirst when they find a contaminated waterhole, and then come down with some kind of fever while they sit out a monsoon.  There are a couple of amusing things in this part of the movie, like the incredibly dramatic way the baggage men 'die' when struck by arrows, but that's not what the audience is here to see.  By the time the party reaches the Mission, the movie is more than half over.

They arrive there only to learn that Dr. Lorenz was killed by one of the bugs, so it’s off into the mountains to find and exterminate them.  So now we're finally gonna get some action, right?  Wrong again!  The group does manage to lob a few grenades, but these do nothing to their targets except annoy them, and the heroes end up trapped underground when the angry wasp queen causes a cave-in.  Time for more padding, as they wander in the dark trying to find their way out!  Luckily they discover an escape route before the Mole People can kidnap them... and moments later the local volcano erupts, destroying the hive.

At this point, we realize... we just followed these characters halfway across a continent, only for their story to end in a deus ex machina?  Oh, fuck off, movie!

This is becoming a personal pet peeve of mine, actually – heroes who don't do anything.  There are an awful lot of them in these movies.  Mark English in Devil Doll never did anything. Cabot in Outlaw never did anything.  Nobody in The Mad Monster ever did anything.  Was this some kind of trend? Because all it does, as I've pointed out before, is make us wonder why we bothered watching this.  Imagine if, I dunno, Star Wars ended when the Death Star was hit by a meteor.  That would be really, really stupid, wouldn't it?

A coincidence can be a powerful ending for a story as long as it has a meaning.  The War of the Worlds ends with the aliens dying of diseases to illustrate the true insignificance of human beings.  It works because the protagonist we’ve been following isn’t trying to defeat the invasion, only to survive it.  The Lord of the Rings ends with Gollum slipping and falling into the volcano because the point is that the Ring ultimately destroys itself.  These are satisfying endings to the stories that came before them.  The ending of Monster from Green Hell just looks like the writers ran out of ideas.  The characters stand and watch and observe, “nature has a way of correcting its mistakes”, but that makes no damn sense either.  The wasps weren't nature's mistake, they were created by humans blasting random shit into space for fun!

This is doubly annoying because Monster from Green Hell starts off pretty well.  The exposition gets out of the way quickly, and although we are disappointingly not treated to a rocket crash, it's not long at all before we get to see the monsters causing panic on the savannah.  These are just the right kind of deliciously awful that we stick around hoping to see them again.  Only slowly do we come to realize that we're never going to get what we really want, which is an actual fight between the heroes and the monsters. The grenade-tossing is fun, but it's not a substitute, and then there's the anticlimax of an ending in which we don't even get to see the wasps overcome by the lava – they're merely superimposed on stock eruption footage while the characters watch.  The movie was seventy percent irrelevant bullshit and now it's over, and the first ten minutes or so did such a good job of getting our attention that we feel like we've been tricked. How dare you, movie?  How dare you!

There's also a totally useless romantic subplot with Dr. Lorenz' daughter Lorna – and when I say useless, I mean fucking useless.  Not only does it not add anything to the story, it doesn't even take anything away.  The romance in Terror from the Year 5000 was useless because it wasted time that could have been spent on the actual plot.  The romance in Monster from Green Hell doesn't even get any time spent on it.  We see that Dr. Brady and Lorna have met, and she keeps running into his arms every time things get intense, but one gets the impression that this only happens because somebody went, “oh, wait, we need a girl in this movie” (and she is, literally, the only woman with lines).  Lorna doesn't even get the minimal plot function that would be imparted by needing rescue.  Why did they bother?

There are a couple of things in this movie that aren't bad. It's not too terrible in an aesthetic sense, at least.  Some of the sets are pretty nice: we open on a matte painting of a desert that isn't really convincing but is still very pretty, and the equipment we see the rocket scientists using is not too laughable.  Dr. Lorenz' mission looks convincingly ramshackle, and I like that it's actually more primitive than the native village we see at one point.  The monsters are stupid but a lot of effort clearly went into building them, and there's a fun bit where one of them fights a stop-motion python.  There's a lot of stock footage but it's usually well matched with the stuff shot for the production – we never find ourselves looking at lions on a savannah while the characters are supposed to be in a trackless jungle (*cough*leechwoman*cough*).

There's also a fairly interesting dynamic between Dr. Lorenz, scoffing at 'native superstition', and his liason with the local tribe, Arobi.  Rather surprisingly, the script permits Arobi more dignity than the entire cast of Voodoo Woman put together. He and Dr. Lorenz like and respect one another, but Arobi resents the scientist's accusations of superstition and argues against them quite effectively.  At the same time, he doesn't want Dr. Lorenz going into the area called Green Hell to investigate the reports.  He is willing to go himself, despite his own fear, and reminds his friend, “I'm much younger than you.”  Vladimir Sokoloff and Joel Fluellen manage to give the impression of having known each other for years, and their relationship is the only one in the movie that rings halfway true.

One final observation I have is here is another movie that seems deeply pessimistic about the possibilities for human space travel.  Some of the experimental animals we meet were exposed to cosmic radiation for less than a minute, and yet they still show signs of mutation.  The monsters, we are told, mutated from ordinary paper wasps in a mere forty hours.  That's not even two days, and it took the Apollo astronauts three days to get to the moon – never mind the time they spent there and the trip back!  In the world of Monster from Green Hell, I imagine that the space race was scrapped before it even began, when Dr. Brady and his colleages submitted a report explaining that the effects of cosmic rays on living tissue were far too dangerous and unpredictable to risk manned spaceflight. We'd be trapped on Earth, the stars forever beyond our reach.

I guess it's a better excuse than being too cheap to fund NASA.

If you’re wondering, the reason the title card for this review doesn’t match any of the other screenshots is because the full title of the movie is never on screen all at once.  I had to grab the title from a trailer on YouTube.