Neq The Sword (Battle Circle #3)

Neq The Sword, by Piers Anthony

No month stated, 1975  Corgi Books

This final volume of the Battle Circle trilogy by Piers Anthony was only published in the UK, until it came out in the United States in 1978 as part of the collected Battle Circle paperback. It’s curious that it did not receive prior publication in the US, but having read the book I would wager a guess that it was because Neq The Sword is a bit of a mess. 

Sadly, the first quarter of the novel is great, and had me ready to declare this final volume the best entry in the trilogy. But then the book took a dark turn, after which it took a goofy turn, before coming to a close in a very muddled fashion. Given that “narcotic flowers” play a big part in the second half of the novel, my guess is that Piers Anthony was ingesting some sweet leaf of his own, and this translated into the book itself. But then I always prefer to imagine that my pulp authors are messed up on some drug or other – even cheap booze would suffice – because the only alternative is that he just turned in a bad book. 

As with Var The Stick, Neq The Sword can be read separate from first volume Sos The Rope…to a point. As with the previous book, while this one starts off for the most part self-contained, eventually we get a lot of “so this is how such and such a thing happened, and why it happened” sort of stuff, as titular Neq gradually ponders and ultimately deduces everything that happened in the previous two books, at much expense to the narrative. Oh and speaking of which – this one is the longest book in the trilogy, and a lot of it could have been cut. 

As mentioned, the first quarter of Neq The Sword is really good. Neq when we meet him has just turned 14, now a man in this post-Blast world, and he’s chosen the sword as his weapon for the battle circle. After some misadventures he ends up in the empire of Sol, from the first book. Anthony skips through the ensuing years, already documented from the perspectives of other characters in the previous books: Sol’s empire grows, and Neq becomes one of the top “sworders” in the empire, even running his own army. 

But a decade passes and everything falls apart – the empire disintigrates, thanks to the disappearance of both Sol and “The Weaponless,” aka Sos, and Neq ventures off across the blasted United States to start a new life as a nomadic warrior. He meets up with the same “crazy” who briefly assisted Sos, back in the first book, and ultimately goes off on a road trip with the crazy’s twenty-something secretary, a hotstuff blonde who made eyes at Sos back in that first book; we learn here that she was formerly “wild” herself, having grown up in the wilderness and rescued by the crazies at a young age. 

Her name is Ms. Smith, but within a few chapters she will be Neqa, as she takes on Neq’s arm bracelet – a recurring gimmick here, that the bracelet indicates that a woman belongs to a particular man, even if just for one night. But here’s the thing: Neq is a virgin, having been too anxious to take a woman (as was his right, per the battle circle rules) for all these years. And here’s the other thing: Ms. Smith, aka Neqa, is also a virgin, and we have this sort of post-Blast setup straight out of a 1940s screwball comedy where two virgins must travel together via truck across America. 

There are also elements of The Road Warrior here, what with Neq insisting he’s the only chance the crazies have of surviving outside of their high-tech world; long story short, the crazy empire has also been destroyed, which happened off-page in the previous book, and Neq has realized that the setup needs to be reinstated, otherwise the world will plunge into anarchy. So he insists on acting as security for Neqa as she drives a truck to get supplies from Helicon mountain, ie the mountain where Sos went to become a metahuman in the first book. 

This part is all pretty great, with Anthony doing a swell job of building up the rapport and eventual love between the two characters, with frequent action scenes as Neq makes short work of attacking brigands (the novel, however, is pretty anemic on the violence factor). But it ultimately becomes goofy, because despite growing close and spending nights together, these two still can’t get over their hangups and just do it already. 

It is almost laughable to read as they hold each other, and tell each other they want to, but then one of them will chicken out, or there will be a sudden brigand attack to distract them, or whatever. I mean, I can understand the skittishness on Neqa’s part, but come on – Neq is like in his mid twenties, at this point, and still a virgin…how much incentive would this guy really need? Indeed one starts to wonder if Neq just has a whole ‘nother type of hangup entirely, and just doesn’t realize it. 

For that matter, Neqa is even older than Neq, and there follows a humorous bit where Neq can’t get over how “old” she is, what with her being in her mid twenties. (To make it even better, Neq keeps referring to Neqa’s breasts in this part, saying how they look like a younger woman’s.) But at least here Anthony makes clear what was only understood in previous books: the non-crazy world is a world of youth, where boys become “men” at 14 and fathers soon after, and where a 35 year-old woman thinks of herself as a grandmother. 

That said, the prepubescent factor that sullied Var The Stick is not evident in Neq The Sword, but Anthony quite makes up for it by taking the novel in an unexpected and dark direction. In fact it gets so dark that I laughed; but long story short – Neqa does end up losing her virginity, but not to Neq. Instead, it’s to like the 50-some men in a tribe who take their turns with her as a bound Neq watches on helplessly. 

After this insane bit of nihilism, there follows an equally-good part where Neq goes out for revenge. Only problem: the brigands cut off both his hands. Problem solved: Neq finds a crazy doctor who gives Neq a sword for a hand, and also gives him pincers for his other hand. How Neq feeds himself or cleans himself is unstated, but it’s all good – he soon goes out to kill the members of the tribe, one by one, chopping them down with his sword hand. Patrick Woodroffe well illustrates this on the cover; as Neq enjoys cutting off the heads of his victims and staking them as warning to the others that their time will soon follow; note that Woodroffe also gives us the sword for a hand in his artwork. 

The only problem is, Piers Anthony has decided he wants to lecture us on how revenge never solves anything. Fine, but save the messaging for a novel that doesn’t feature a dude with a sword for a hand, okay? So we get all this crap where Neq, at much expense, realizes that nothing can bring back Neqa and etc, and etc. Oh and meanwhile the dude is still a virgin. Well anyway, in another (possibly cannabis-inspired) change of plot, Neq next decides that his reason for being will be to restore order to the post-Blast world by rebuilding Helicon, ie the high-tech underworld that was destroyed in Var The Stick. 

Oh and speaking of Var – SPOILER ALERT – Neq kills him, folks! Seriously. There’s another change of plot as Neq is tasked by the crazies with finding all these people and bringing them to the crazies to help rebuild Helicon, for reasons never adequately explained. So he has to get Tyl the stick fighter, and also Sos, and Sol, and Sola, and Sosa, and even Var – but the thing is, everyone is still under the impression that Var killed the little girl who was sent to fight him…but as readers of the previous book know, she instead ran off with Var, grew up into a teenaged beauty, then married Var and became Vara. 

Well, so much for Var, and now we have another change of pace as Neq is disgusted with himself and wants Vara to kill him – and Vara is quite ready to, given that she’s lost Var due to Neq’s “kill first, regret later” policy. But here comes Tyl, a minor character from the previous books now thrust for some reason into the limelight, who gives a lecture on how revenge doesn’t solve anything…and it goes on and on, with the three venturing across the badlands while Tyl argues with them over whether Vara has a right to kill Neq, and etc. 

Then we get to these hallucinogenic flowers that cause nightmares to be real, and it just goes on and on and on, and it gets even more laughable because soon a flower-maddened Vara is trying to screw Neq, but even here Neq pushes her away (as Arsenio would say, “Hmmm…”), and then finally they do it, and Piers Anthony leaves it off page entirely. I mean Neq loses his virginity in his late 20s and you’d think we’d at least get more than a sentence about it, but we do not. 

But folks, things get even more befuddling, as the crew makes it back to Helicon, and there’s a debate over whether Neq should lead them…oh, and have I mentioned yet that at this point it’s Neq The Glockenspiel? Folks I kid you not. As a way to show how he has sworn never to kill again, Neq has a glockenspiel molded to his sword-hand, and thus goes around singing to people as he taps out a melody on his glockenspiel hand. Like seriously, they had some good drugs back in the ‘70s, didn’t they? I almost wonder if Piers Anthony didn’t make a drunken bet with someone: “Dude, I’m gonna write a book where a guy has a glockenspiel for a hand! Hey, is that Sabbath? Turn it up, man!” 

Then it’s old home week as various characters return to Helicon, some of them characters not seen since the first book, but again it lacks any resonance because Anthony must deliver a lot of exposition to explain where they’ve been for all these years. Oh and SPOILER ALERT, but neither Sos nor Sol return, indicating that they did truly have a heroic sacrifice in the previous book. 

Neq does pretty damn well for himself; by novel’s end he knocks up both Vara and her mother, Sosa, the sultry and built lady from the first book who is now “old” in her mid-30s…folks there’s even a bit where Neq argues with Sosa that lots of men will want her despite her age, because in Helicon women are shared by the men due to the scarcity of women. Neq and Vara even break up, in the most off-handed matter, because Vara too will be expected to, uh, screw every other guy in the place, and Neq doesn’t want to interfere with tradition. 

It’s only just occurred to me that Neq The Sword is a commentary on the turned-on ‘60s generation: the drugs, the rampant arguments against violence, the shared communal women, and of course the narcotic flowers. And let’s not forget the glockenspiel, shall we? I guess looked at from that perspective, Neq The Sword is a triumph. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it, though; the first part was good, yes, but once Neq has achieved his vengeance it’s as if Anthony finished his tale sooner than expected, and so he got some chemical inspiration on what to fill up the rest of the book with. 

All told, Battle Circle really does not work as a trilogy. There is too little connecting the three books, and too much repetition in the parts that do connect with each other. Piers Anthony would have done just as well to leave it at Sos The Rope; as it is, the following two books only served to dilute the mythic impact of that first book. 

Here’s the cover of the Battle Circle book I read, which contains all three volumes; it was published in 1978 by Avon Books. I picked this up around 8 years ago and completely forgot about it until I came across it in my garage, of all places! The cover for this one is also by Patrick Woodroffe, and is taken from the original UK paperback edition of Sos The Rope:

Var The Stick (Battle Circle #2)

Var The Stick, by Piers Anthony

December, 1973  Bantam Books

I didn’t mean to read this second installment of the Battle Circle trilogy so soon; in fact I meant to post a review of a Sobs novel this week. But I started reading Var The Stick and ended up finishing it first. Piers Anthony continues on with his post-Blast storyline, world-building but at the same time moving away from the post-nuke Iliad vibe of the previous volume. 

It’s curious that the Battle Circle trilogy seemed to resonate more in the UK than here in the US; Var The Stick was first published there in hardcover in 1972, a year before this Bantam paberback original was published in the US. And final installment Neq The Sword (1975) was only published in the UK, not coming out in the US until it’s inclusion in the 1979 collection Battle Circle. 

It’s a year or so after the events of Sos The Rope and everything is essentially status quo; Sos, now known either as “The Master” or “The Weaponless” (and never referred to as “Sos” in the narrative) rules the empire he was supposed to dismantle in the previous book – the empire that was ruled by Sol, who went to suicide mountain with his daughter Soli at the climax of the previous book. Now Sos has everything he ever wanted, in particular Sola, the busty babe who married Sol in the previous book but really loved Sos (and also, uh, had a child with him), but a Piers Anthony protagonist can never be happy, and thus Sos finds his crown heavy. 

Piers Anthony has written Var The Stick so that it could be read as a standalone; reading it in the collection Battle Circle, immediately after Sos The Rope, one encounters a lot of repetition. This is because titular Var the Stick spends a lot of the narrative wondering over – and gradually learning – things we readers already learned in Sos The Rope. It does not add to the mythos nor inject any drama into the proceedings, and instead just comes off like a bunch of repetition of material that was handled better in the previous book. 

The shame of it is, Var The Stick has a wonderful opening. One of the tribes in Sos’s empire is under attack by a beast in the cornfields; The Master himself is called in to look into it. The cyborg master of karate soon deduces that the beast is really a mutant boy. There follows an unexpectedly touching (but in a masculine way, of course) scene in which man and mutant boy start off as hunter and prey before turning to each other for survival in the radioactive badlands. 

The effective opening only continues as we pick up four years later and the mutant boy – Var – heads back into that same tribe to test himself in the battle circle and thereby earn a name for himself. Despite winning, Var finds no willing women to take him, due to his mutant looks…until none other than Sola, “middle-aged” and “old” at 25, gives herself to Var that night in the tent they share; Sola, married to Sos but in love with his previous, pre-cyborg version and not the current model, reveals that the Master cannot have children, so once again the poor girl hasn’t gotten any in a while (a recurring theme for poor Sola, whose first husband, Sol, didn’t even have a dick). 

Anthony handles this sequence with more of a touching tone than a sleazy one, but we are told without getting too explicit of Sola’s ripe curves and whatnot; again we are firmly reminded that Sola has a kick-ass bod, but unfortunately she is barely in this novel. Same goes for Sos, and same goes even more so for Sol, who only shows up in passing. Even small-natured karate gal Sosa, whom Sos really loves, only appears in passing. As mentioned, Var The Stick is essentially a standalone tale. 

Instead of building on the storyline in the previous book, Anthony this time delivers a long chase sequence that encompasses the majority of the narrative. But still, it starts off seeming to pick up from the previous story; Sos, it develops, is planning to wage war on Helicon Mountain, aka the mountain he climbed to commit suicide but in reality is staffed with tech-loving “crazies” who live underground and who gave Sos his cyborg augmentations. Sos wants to wage war on them, certain that Sol and little Soli (who is actually Sos’s daughter, given Sol’s aforementioned lack of a dick) are being held captive there. He also wants to hook up with the little karate woman, Sosa. 

The only issue is, all this is relayed through the perspective of Var, a mutant kid of 15 or so who has no idea who any of these people are – and, what’s more, is so new to society that he has a hard time relating to anyone at all. This means there is a lot of obsfucation and vaguery, with Var only belatedly figuring out what is going on – figuring out stuff that would be dealt with posthaste if the tale had been told from Sos’s perspective, as the earlier book was. 

But Sos has become a remote figure now, and rarely do we enter his thoughts. It’s like the star of the trilogy has been reduced to a supporting character, and I can’t say we got a better character with Var. If I was prone to lame puns, I’d say we were given the short end of the stick. Well anyway, Var fights with sticks, and after a belabored battle sequence where Sos’s army attacks the mountain – a scene which is mostly told in summary, robbing it of any drama – it’s determined that Var will represent the empire and Hellicon will choose another hero to battle him, a hero-vs-hero match for control of the mountain. 

I’d write “spoiler alert,” but we’re still fairly early in the book; the champion turns out to be eight year-old Soli, aka the daughter of Sol (but really the daughter of Sos)…who, per tradition, fights in the nude. Not to sound like one of those perennially-aggrieved Goodreads reviewers, but this set off my “ick!” radar…only compounded by the fact that little Soli, who again is only eight years old, talks and acts like a regular adult. 

My son happens to be eight years old, and granted he’s a boy and also he wasn’t born after the nuclear Blast, and also he’s not a karate master, but still…I think from him I have a fairly good understanding of how well an eight year-old can communicate. Soli sounds nothing like this; she evidences logic and understanding well beyond her years, hell even at some points she’s beyond an adult of our own era (which, granted, isn’t really saying very much), to the point that it really drew me out of the book. I mean, I’m good with post-nuke pulp, and societies built around formalized battle in a circle, and even mutants…but too-intelligent and too-communicative eight year-olds is where I can no longer suspend my disbelief. 

It gets even harder to believe, as Soli is such a great fighter that her battle with Var, waged atop a cliff where hardly anyone can see them, goes on for hours, to the point that they call a temporary truce so they can each take a piss off the cliff! Then Soli – who, again, acts like the adult throughout – realizes that due to the fog no one can see them anyway, so they decide to sneak down the cliff and get some food. 

Anyway, let’s just cut to the chase…for “chase” is essentially all Var The Stick soon becomes. Piers Anthony jettisons the post-nuke love triangle meets Homer vibe of the previous book in favor of an endless sequence where Var and Soli head off together into post-blast America, with Sos chasing after them – and Sos is chasing them due to a harebrained subplot in which Var lies that he killed Soli on the clifftop, and thus has no idea why Sos would suddenly be so angry at him. Again, this novel is a very frustrating read for anyone who read the previous book, because the protagonist has no idea what happened in that previous book, while readers on the other hand do know, hence you spend the entire novel wishing Var the Stick had stayed in the cornfields and never gotten involved with the storyline in the first place. 

And this chase goes on for like a year or more, too! Things finally pick up when Var and Soli make it to the Pacific, where they run afoul of a Queen and her army of armored amazons, and here we have a strange bit where the mega-fat Queen wants to have sex with Var, given that all the men in her empire are eunnuchs. Fortunately, though, Anthony has refrained all this time from exploiting little Soli too much; my blog should be a testament to how much I love the lack of boundaries in ‘70s pulp fiction, but at the same time I believe that there are some boundaries that should not be crossed. 

Unfortunately, Anthony does cross those lines in the final quarter. Keeping up with the overall Greek myth vibe of the trilogy, Soli is at one point lashed up naked to a large rock by the ocean so as to be devoured by the god Minos. It’s all very Clash Of The Titans, and all this occurs on the island of New Crete after Var and Soli have been traveling together for some time; indeed, Soli is held captive in a temple for around two years while Var bides his time, working odd jobs and trying to figure out how to save her. 

There is, I’ve dicovered, always an oddball sort of vibe to a Piers Anthony novel, and such is certainly true in Var The Stick. I mean, it’s a post-apocalypse and the gal’s about to be sacrificed, but there’s literally a two-year interim where Var goes to work so as to make money for himself! Just not the sort of thing you’d expect to read in a post-nuke fantasy. Even odder, Minos is a bull-headed man who is capable of intelligent speech, as he’s been augmented by the crazies, same as Sos was, and he has a casual and friendly conversation with Var. 

Anyway, to keep Minos from ravishing Soli – we’re told the pseudo-god’s dick is so big it rips his victims apart – Var and Soli have sex on the rock, as Minos’s violent lust is only aroused by virgins. If my math is correct, Soli is only like twelve years old here. Anthony does not get explicit, leaving it as an “embrace” the two have, there on the rock, giving vent to their feelings for each other…but still. The “ick” factor returns in force when Minos comes back with a couple female corpses, girls “about the same age as Soli,” and it’s made clear that he’s raped them to death. 

And then we’re back to the oddball stuff; Var and Soli, pretending the moment on the rocks never happened, make it all the way to China, where Var suddenly decides Soli would be better off without him, and thus puts her in a “posh” school, paying her tuition by getting a job as a trash collector. I mean seriously, WTF? I’m not making any of this up. Two years pass, after which Soli is about to be given over to the emperor’s harem or somesuch, and Var has to act fast, as he’s finally realized he loves Soli…but how does she feel about him? 

At this point, the cool, “augmented warrior in a post-nuke wasteland” vibe of Sos The Rope is long, long gone. As even more of a slap to the face, we learn – in passing! – that Sos and Sol have been traveling together all these years, looking for Var and Soli. If you’re taking notes, this is the story we should’ve gotten in the sequel! But as mentioned, those two are supporting characters now – Sol, actually, is even less than that – and the reader can only wonder over the better novel this could have been. I mean we’re even told, again in passing, that Sol destroyed Helicon mountain in his wrath…like, couldn’t we have read about that instead of Var getting a job as a trash collector in China?? 

The finale sees Var and Soli (now named Vara, as she’s the wife of Var, even though she’s only like 14 or 15 now) heading back to America, to spread the word that “American society is the best.” Who would’ve expected a proto-MAGA sentiment at the end of a novel titled Var The Stick? 

I think this time I truly will take a bit of a break before finishing off the Battle Circle trilogy; next week I’ll have that Sobs review up. Actually one of these days I’d love to get back to a twice-weekly posting schedule…I’m working on it!

Sos The Rope (Battle Circle #1)

Sos The Rope, by Piers Anthony

October, 1968  Pyramid Books

Sos The Rope started life as a three-part serialized novel in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction (July-September, 1968), before being published as this slim paperback. Then in 1978 it was collected with its sequels, Var The Stick (1972) and Neq The Sword (1975), as a fat mass market paperback titled Battle Circle. It was the collected edition that I read, but I’ll review the titles separately because I’m just that kind of guy. 

I recall picking up Battle Circle sometime in 2017, and recently discovered it in a box in my garage, of all places. Indeed, I discovered it on the very same day I (re)discovered my copies of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant (those were in a different box in a different room, though; I guess I’m just a hoarder at heart). 

While he is incredibly prolific, the only Piers Anthony novels I have read are the Jason Striker series and the Total Recall novelization. Thus I cannot say I am an expert in the style of Piers Anthony, but Sos The Rope reads very much like those other books: a somewhat formal tone to the narrative, with a somewhat lurid feeling (this is a good thing, of course), but nothing too exploitative or explicit (this is a bad thing, of course). 

The biggest comparison to Jason Striker is the dumb-ass protagonist. As we’ll recall, Jason Striker was this tough judo master who happened to be a ‘Nam vet, but he blundered like a fool from one situation to the next. The same holds true of this novel’s protagonist, the titular Sos The Rope, who basically gets his ass handed to him again and again in the battle circles of this post-nuke America. And like Striker he makes one poor choice after another, usually a victim of his own nature. 

Anyway, we know from the outset that Sos The Rope is set in a post-nuke world; or, post “Blast,” as the characters refer to it. In the first pages we have references to plastic, a refrigerator, and even television, yet at the same time it is clear this is a primitive society, with men wandering around on foot and challenging one another in the formalized, ritualized practice of battle-circle dueling. 

It’s worth noting however that this is not a bloodthirsty post-nuke society by any means; the battle circle fights are rarely to the death and are more so ritualized ways of settling differences or matters of honor. Brawny men choose their names, specialize in one of the weapons allowed in the battle circle (swords, staffs, knives, etc), and roam the post-nuke country like nomads. What sets off the course of Sos The Rope, and the ensuing trilogy, is a meeting between two men who have the same name: Sol. 

I’ll admit, the first several pages were a bumpy read. There’s nothing like trying to make sense of a post-nuke pulp from decades ago in which two muscular men, both named Sol, challenge one another in a battle circle on the windswept plains while a nameless young woman (with a “voluptuous body”) watches on. I had a helluva time keeping track of which Sol was which, but basically one of them has long black hair and a beard, and the other one has long blonde hair and no beard. 

The bearded one is Sol The Sword, because that’s his weapon; the beardless one is Sol of All Weapons, and he carries around a wheelbarrow or something with all his fighting gear. The two men meet at a hostel – a place, we’re informed, that was set up by “the crazies” and is used as lodging for the nomadic warriors – and they have a friendly disagreement over who “owns” the name Sol. They decide to settle their differences in the battle circle by the hostel, all while some busty chick who works at the hostel watches on, ready to give herself to the winner. 

Anthony, given his martial arts background, is pretty good with hand-to-hand fight description, as proven with Jason Striker. But still, it’s hard to know which Sol is which, let alone which one to root for. Not that it matters, as neither is killed and indeed they become lifelong friends: but, for what it’s worth, “our” Sol, ie the supposed hero of this novel who will become “Sos,” gets his ass kicked and loses – which, of course, sets the tone for the rest of the book. 

The fight was for the name of Sol, and now that this Sol has lost, he needs a new name. Eventually he will become “Sos.” As for the busty girl, she gives herself to Sol, the winner, and so she becomes Sola – in other words, women don’t even have a name until a man has taken them, a sign of how male-dominated this post-Blast society is. If you listen closely, you can hear the piteous wailings of the ever-indignant wokesters over on Goodreads: “How dare Piers Anthony stoop to such misogyny! His female characters have no agency!” And etc. 

An interesting thing is that Anthony works his world-building into the narrative, never shoehorning us with info; eventually we learn that there is no rape in this post-Blast world, where the men actually respect the women. Indeed, there is a later part where Sos sleeps in a hostel that is occupied by a girl who has expressly come there to find a man, and since Sos is not interested in her (not suprising, given his overall lameness), she sleeps by him without concern of being raped. 

The nomadic warrirors wear metal bracelets, and the women they choose – whether for life or just for the night – wear the bracelet when chosen. Gradually I realized this was Anthony’s post-nuke spin on a wedding ring. But this is how Sola becomes Sola, wearing the bracelet of Sol – and she, Sol, and Sos will prove to be the three main characters of Sos The Rope. 

The trio venture into the Badlands, ie the still-radiated wastelands around the countryside, and encounter all kinds of brutal flora and fauna. The latter is evidenced by a rat swarm that might raise the hackles of more sensitive readers (as if sensitive readers would be reading a book titled Sos The Rope!). The bigger threat however is the love triangle that develops: Sola belongs to Sol, but Sos and Sola have a thing for each other. 

Sadly, it develops that Sol does not have a, uh, thing; left comatose from the bite of a mutant moth, Sol is dragged to safety from the rats and loses his clothes in the process, and Sos discovers that Sol is castrated; something Sola was already aware of. So basically she’s “married” to a guy who cannot give her the goods, yet still – for reasons of honor and such – Sos won’t give Sola what she clearly wants. 

I forgot to mention: Sos as a child was reared by “the crazies,” ie the tech-savvy overlords who run things behind the scenes. They are the ones who stock the high-tech hostels and whatnot, and have all the learnings of the pre-Blast world, and Sos has not only learned to read but knows a fair bit of history…though he is uncertain how true those ancient books really are. 

Piers Anthony does a good job of keeping the story moving while doling out small bits of background about the post-Blast world. Meanwhile the main narrative has Sos becoming Sol’s best buddy and sidekick; Sol dreams of starting an empire, but he knows he isn’t smart enough. Sos, meanwhile, is smart in all those ways, so Sos agrees to serve Sol for one year and help him gather men into an army. 

Meanwhile Sos and Sola become an item while Sol is off gathering men, but Anthony leaves it off-page. About the most us sleazehounds get are random mentions of Sola’s “voluptuous” build and pretty face…not much. But Sos manages to knock her up, though this tidbit is left off-page; curiously, Anthony leaves many important events off-page…most notably, a part where Sos challenges Sol in the battle circle for Sola and her newly-born daughter. 

Yes, Anthony cuts immediately to some time later, and we learn that Sos has once again had his ass handed to him. So much for the “rope” he’s learned to fight with; all this is after the empire has been started, and Sos has gone back to the crazies to learn what to fight with now that he’s lost the right to use a sword. A rope wouldn’t be my first choice, and anyway Sos still can’t beat Sol, so whatever. 

Here’s where Sos The Rope gets real interesting. It’s some time later and Sos has decided to end his life by climbing this big mountain that people go to when they’re ready to commit suicide. He climbs up and up, then “dies,” then wakes up in this high-tech “underworld” that is run by the crazies. He will eventually hook up with a lithe young (and small-statured) lady with major karate skills (again, the hanky-panky occurs off-page), but most importantly Sos here is augmented into a sort of cyborg warrior so as to be sent back out into the world to kill Sol and topple his empire. 

My assumption is Piers Anthony was influenced here by Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, and this sequence – where Sos dies and then goes to an underworld where he has plastic armor embedded beneath his skin, and his muscles augmented, and etc – reminded me very much of the Neoplatonist readings of The Iliad. 

Simply put, the Neoplatonic reading of the Iliad goes like this: when Achilles’ best friend/lover Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector while wearing the armor of Achilles, the idea is that Achilles himself has died. After Patroclus dies, Achilles stops eating the food of mortals and instead eats ambrosia, the food of the gods. He goes to his mother, who happens to be a minor-grade goddess, and she in turn goes to Hephastus, aka Vulcan, and asks this major god to forge divine armor for Achilles. Dressed in this divine armor, Achilles is unstoppable when he goes back to the war at Troy, eventually killing Hector. The Neoplatnic reading here is that Achilles the mortal has died, reborn in his divine armor – ie his divine soul. 

That’s all very basic, and I’m sure I missed quite a bit, but that’s the essential idea, and more importantly for the goal of this review – that is what Piers Anthony has happen to Sos the Rope. It was at this point, around a hundred pages in, with Sos transformed into a sort of walking tank, with armor plating beneath his skin, that I realized Sos The Rope was a post-nuke Iliad. 

At this point I was very much into the novel; it was just that sort of late ‘60s/early ‘70s sci-fi I love, with a metaphysical and slightly psychedelic edge, but again it was slightly undone by the blunderings of Sos – or, “The Nameless One” as he is now known, a giant who towers over the average men. Piers Anthony again gives us a doofus protagonist who can’t make up his own mind; Sos has carried a torch for Sola all this time, and indeed he decided to climb suicide mountain over his loss of her. But, despite only thinking of the little karate lady as a casual lay in the underworld, Sos realizes, after leaving her forever, that he was truly in love with her, not Sola! Actually, now that I think of it, Piers Anthony might understand male characters better than any other sci-fi writer. 

Seriously though, this kind of gets to be a little much, and takes away from Sos’s post-death meta-human makeover (we’re told his hair has even gone white, like he’s some sort of super-deformed anime hero). But even in his superhuman state Sos blunders, outing himself on his first night back in the real world and inadvertently letting one of Sol’s men know who he is – the idea is, see, that Sos takes the job from the crazies to kill Sol, but really he plans to sneak into the empire and tell Sol to end his empire, so that Sol doesn’t have to die. 

This entails a lot of fights with Sol’s underlings so Sos can prove himself – again, the fighting is for the most part bloodless (save for one fight where Sos accidentally kills someone), but it’s cool how Sos has essentially become the post-Blast Hulk. Even here Piers Anthony does a curious skipping of important parts and suddenly has Sol and Sos confronting each other, though Sol apparently doesn’t realize this huge cyborg creature is actually his old buddy, Sos (or maybe he does; Anthony leaves this vague). 

The finale of Sos The Rope is quite curious, with the two characters arguing with Sol’s chieftans over whether or not Sol’s empire should be disbanded. SPOILER ALERT: The finale is rather downbeat, with Sol himself deciding to head on up suicide mountiain, his little girl demanding to go along with him – and Sos sadly watches his old buddy stalk off, kicking himself that Sol will no doubt make it up the mountain alive and end up banging the cute little karate girl that Sos has only now realized he’s in love with. In other words: wash, rinse, repeat – Sos now has the woman he wanted, Sola, but again he is jealous of Sol, who will no doubt soon be giving the little karate girl some good lovin. 

Well, all this no doubt is covered in the next volume, Var The Stick, which I’ll be reading soon. I have to say, I quite enjoyed Sos The Rope, especially the unexpected eleventh-hour jump into a sort of meta-human Iliad riff. I hope Piers Anthony continues with this vibe in the next books; one can only imagine the surreal, over-budgeted, psychedelic mess of a film Alejandro Jodorowsky might’ve made out of it.

Richard Blade #25: The Torian Pearls

Richard Blade #25: The Torian Pearls, by Jeffrey Lord

August, 1977  Pinnacle Books

I hadn’t planned to read any more Richard Blade novels after the debacle that was #9: Kingdom Of Royth, which happened to be “new” author Roland Green’s first installment of the series. Given that Green went on to write the ensuing 27 volumes of the series (a one-off author named Ray Nelson contributed the 30th volume), I figured reading more books by him wouldn’t be worth the trouble. But the other month I came across this volume and the next on the clearance rack of a local Half Price Books (which is where I do all my book shopping these days; you never know what you’re going to find!), so I figured what the hell. 

But man, reading this book wasn’t worth the trouble. At 182 pages of small, dense print, The Torian Pearls was a chore to read. And a pulp novel about a sub-Conan getting in swordfights and bedding busty babes should never be a chore to read. It was Kingdom Of Royth all over again, and it baffles me that series producer Lyle Kenyon Engel kept Green on the series. My assumption is Green was just turning in his manuscripts on time. Or maybe the series was selling and Engel decided not to rock the boat, but I’m gonna assume that if Richard Blade did sell, it was mostly due to the era in which it was printed (sword and sorcery being pretty popular in the late ‘70s), and/or the covers were drawing people in (this one being by Kelly Freas). 

Everything that original series creator Manning Lee Stokes imbued the series with is long gone. Richard Blade, while still a brawny fighter and leader of men, has lost all of the macho qualities Stokes gave him. Indeed, Green is once again at pains to point out that Blade “doesn’t kill needlessly,” and there are parts where Blade congratulates himself that he didn’t kill some foe. He also spends an inordinate amount of time worrying that the women he beds in Dimension X won’t get killed or go nuts – both things which have often happened in the past, as Green recounts in the opening pages. 

But let’s face it, by this point Roland Green had written 16 volumes, twice more than Stokes did, so Richard Blade was Roland Green’s series at this point. As evidence of this Green adds a lot of continuity to the series, with the curious tidbit that all the continuity is related to prior Green novels. The first 8 Stokes volumes are ignored, and that Richard Blade is long gone – the Richard Blade who was prone to doubt and brooding in Home Dimension, but who turned into a vicious, almost unstoppable force of masculinity in Dimension X. Roland Green’s Richard Blade is a pale reflection of that earlier character, though it must be admitted he is more of a standard hero. Whereas Stokes’s Blade would kill with impunity, in some cases just to make a point, Green’s Blade is more concerned with keeping peace and helping people. 

Interesting, sure, but the delivery leaves a lot to desire. The Torian Pearls is a sluggish, trying read, everything relayed in bland and unthrilling tones. Even the battle scenes are rendered limp by the mundane narrative style. Midway through the novel I realized what the issue was: literally everything is relayed through Richard Blade’s perspective. The novel could just as well be written in first-person. Each page is comprised of nigh-endless paragraphs of description or the thoughts of Richard Blade; there is seldom any dialog, and absolutely no other characters rise to the surface. In a Stokes novel, there would be interraction with various characters. In Green’s books, the entirety is focused on Blade and his thoughts, and the other characters he meets in Dimension X serve as his sounding boards, having at the most a handful of lines of dialog. Even the women Blade beds – with one falling in love with Blade (and vice versa) and becoming pregnant with his child – are ciphers, briefly emerging from the dense narrative murk to say a line or two before disappearing back into it. 

Seriously though, it’s 182 pages of stuff like this: 

Very seldom does another character talk to Blade and give his or her opinion on things; almost everything is relayed via the narrative, as if we were reading a history book. To add to this, the adventure lasts over several months – one holdover from the Stokes novels – so there’s a lot of “three months passed” and the sort, further making the reader feel as if he’s reading a history book about some guy named Blade, who goes to a new Dimension and starts to align the various peoples into one nation. And really that’s all that happens in The Torian Pearls. The plot is so uninvolving: Blade finds himself in a swampy world, befriends a traveling group of warriors, wins their respect, then leads them in various battles with other warlike peoples in this swampy world, with the goal of unifying the various nations. That’s it, folks. There’s no real impetus to the story nor any goal for Blade; why he’s still being sent to Dimension X in the first place is not even dwelt upon. 

That said, Green it appears has tried to work a sort of continuing storyline into Richard Blade. There’s now some stuff about the “Menel,” a race of aliens who have plagued Blade in past installments – apparently #10: Ice Dragon was the first, but I could be wrong; I’m only guessing this from the narrative. In The Torian Pearls Blade again comes across the Menel, who have spaceships and may also be able to bridge dimensions. But hey, don’t listen to me; here are two pages of typically-dense text as Blade ponders the Menel: 

 

Note that all of that is material Richard Blade could have discussed with someone else. Hell, even if he was just talking to a rock! But the above is another indication of what I’m talking about. The entire damn book is just Blade and his thoughts, which go on for pages and pages with no dialog breaks. I mean, Manning Lee Stokes certainly turned in some padded and boring volumes, but at least the guy gave Blade someone to talk to! The characters Blade encounters in The Torian Pearls are so cipher-like that I once again return to my original theory that Richard Blade isn’t really going to any “Dimension X” at all; the entire series is just the hallucinations of Richard Blade. In other words, it’s all about him because it all is him, like a dream or something. 

Well anyway, the plot itself is lame, mostly because there really is no plot. Blade’s been spending some time walking through the woods of Scotland or something when we meet him, reflecting on past Dimension X exploits (only the Green ones), and he heads on back to the Tower of London for his next trip to Dimension X. He comes to in a swampy world and gradually finds himself encountering one after another group of people who are fighting for the ever-diminishing land. The oceans are expanding and land is becoming precious, and it’s a wonder this book hasn’t been discovered and cherished by the climate cultists. But then it’s much too masculine for them…even in neutered form, Blade still gets in lots of fights, eventually becoming a leader of men. 

But it’s all so nauseatingly repetitive and bland; Blade meets one group, he befriends them and wars with them against their enemies; he meets another group, he befriends them and wars with them against their enemies. There’s also a proto-Dances With Wolves/Avatar bit where Blade is not believed to be a true warrior and must prove himself in various native rituals, culminating in a fight against the top warrior. But again it’s all so tepidly described, because the entirety is locked in Bland’s thoughts and reactions (it’s the first jpeg excerpt, above). 

The sexual material is just as bland; Blade hooks up with three women in the book, per the template, but everything is off-page. And the female characters are even more cipher-like than the men, literally only showing up for Blade to bang off-page and then disappearing back into the text. Hey, they’re the perfect women! Seriously though, what’s humorous is that Blade apparently falls in love with one of them, and indeed sires a child with her, but Blade’s gone before he finds out whether it’s a boy or a girl. If I’m not mistaken, in a future volume Blade returns to this Dimension and meets his child, and if I’m further unmistaken it’s a boy and also a grown man when Blade returns, given the loosy-goosy nature of time in Dimension X. It would be interesting to read, but given what I know of Roland Green’s novels, I’m sure it won’t amount to much, as it all will be locked in Blade’s thoughts with the other characters not having the space to breathe. 

The alien Menel only factor in randomly; Blade survives a lot of wild animal attacks, from flying reptiles to water creatures, and he hacks one open and finds a crystal in the brain – apparently the same thing the Menel did in a previous volume. There’s also a Menel UFO that crashes, but Green is maddeningly vague when it comes to describing the aliens. Indeed, Green’s descriptions throughout are maddeningly vague; even female characters are not given the exploitation that is customary of the genre. Instead the novel is like an endless sprawl of Blade thinking this and Blade pondering that as he voyages across the swampy world and unites various groups into one, eventually launching a war against the titular Torians, an empire that is headed up by a hotstuff, wanton babe in her 40s. 

But Green has squandered so much text that he rushes through all this – the queen takes Blade as her plaything and we only learn about it in hindsight, with none of the naughty stuff Stokes would’ve given us. That said, Green does deliver a memorable sendoff for Blade, having him zapped back to Home Dimension while the queen is giving him a blowjob! Speaking of rushing through things, only here in the very last pages are we informed that Blade’s bosses have taken care of a publicity matter, apparently from an earlier volume, in which Blade saved some people from a crashing train, and Scotland Yard were trying to figure out who the “mystery hero” was who’d saved them, Blade having vanished into the shadows to preserve his secret identity. This is literally brought up and dispensed with in a few lines of text on the last pages, so either Green forgot about his own dangling subplot or editor Lyle Kenyon Engel grafted it in to Green’s manuscript. 

Overall, The Torian Pearls was terrible. I went into this one wanting to think that Roland Green had improved after so many volumes, but it seems more apparent that Richard Blade should’ve ended when Manning Lee Stokes left the series.

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 18

Grindhouse/Drive-in movies: 

Invasion Of The Bee Girls (1973): Bringing the vibe of ‘50s paranoia sci-fi like Invasion of The Body Snatchers to the drive-in ‘70s, Invasion Of The Bee Girls follows the same path as those earlier drive-in flicks but adds in ‘70s-mandatory boobs. Burly William Smith is cast against type as an amiable, even-tempered State Department agent who spends the entire movie wearing a three-piece suit and smiling; you get the impression he’s dying to tear off the suit and start swinging his fists. Despite being somewhat miscast, he’s still good in the role, and like the same year’s Wonder Women this one almost comes off like the film adaptation of a men’s adventure series that never was. 

Written by Nicholas Meyer, there’s a bit more to the movie than the standard drive-in fare of the day, with various “readings” of the film possible. To me it seems a clear reaction to the women’s lib of the day, though spoofing it to a certain extent. The gist of the story is that men in smalltown Peckham, in California, are dying of massive heart attacks, apparently caused by lots of sex. Though the film never outright states it, the implication is clear: they’ve been fucked to death. But then, the movie is interesting in how it’s never too R-rated; while there is copious boobage, there’s little cursing and hardly any violence. It’s essentially a mainstream take on drive-in pulp, and perhaps it’s for this reason that Invasion Of The Bee Girls is relatively unknown: it’s too timid for the hardcore grindhouse fans and it’s too saucy for mainstream movie fans. 

Truth be told, it is a little slow-paced, operating more on a long-simmer mystery angle than the slam-bang sci-fi action one might expect. Smith’s character is called in because the men dying happen to be employed at a secret governmental research base in town, and the State Department is concerned of threats and whatnot. Safe to say, there’s never been a State Department officer who looked like William Smith (especially not in today’s “intersectional” era), but for a guy who spent the previous decade busting heads in various biker movies, Smith acquits himself well as a nattily-attired agent who’s just trying to do his job. There isn’t even the expected antagonism with the local cops; indeed, there’s a part midway through where the local police chief loses his cool over the “Fed” pushing in on his territory, and Smith just grins and apologizes for stepping on his toes. It’s way against type for Smith, but one imagines he enjoyed the opportunity to play less of a hot-head. 

While the movie spends most of its time focused on Smith trying to figure out what’s going on, the viewer already knows that sultry Anitra Ford, who plays a researcher at the secret base, is basically turning the town’s women into the titular Bee Girls. Now one thing to note is that the awesome poster for the film is misleading: the Bee Girls never wear costumes. 

But then, they don’t wear anything. One of the humorous bits about the movie is that all of these Peckham women are total babes: there’s a laugh out loud part where we meet the widow of one of the men – a heavyset bald guy who looks like Colonel Klink – and she’s a mega-stacked babe who goes topless throughout a practically endless sequence in which we see how the Bee Girls are created. But then, Smith’s character spends the entire movie working with a research assistant at the base who wears glasses and dresses conservatively, and late in the novel she too is captured and almost given the Bee Girl treatment, topless and showing off a body that’s straight out of Playboy…not surprising, given that the actress is Victoria Vettri, who was a famous Playmate in the late ‘60s. Indeed her centerfold picture even made it to the Moon, courtesy the rowdy Apollo 12 crew. Even here Smith’s character shows special consideration; he doesn’t even make his interest in her known until the end, when he throws her on a bed and climbs on top of her. Given that the camera pans over to a bee and we hear “Thus Spake Zarathustra” on the soundtrack as the two get with it, the implication is clear that Vettri’s character might have indeed become a Bee Girl. 

Overall Invasion Of The Bee Girls is fun, but one must think of it more as a hybrid of sci-fi and mystery, as it never goes to the action levels one might hope for. Production values are certainly high for the genre, with Anitra Ford’s high-tech secret chambers being especially cool. But the pace kind of plods at times and one wishes William Smith had been given more to do than just ask questions. That said, the movie scores points for featuring the guy who played the Mafioso in Black Belt Jones as a “sex researcher” at the base. Also, Charles Bernstein’s jazz-funk score is very nice, with an effective main theme featuring a wordless “la la la” melody that almost sounds like it could’ve come off an Italian picture of the day. 

Speaking of men’s adventure, there’s a part toward the very end where the Bee Girls lab is blowing up and William Smith watches the action through a window in a door, and he looks just like the profile portrait of Adrano on the Adrano For Hire covers: 

Seizure (1974): Back in 2016 I bought the Trailer Trauma grindhouse/drive-in trailer compilation Blu Ray, because it was the only new release of its kind after the awesome 42nd Street Forever series came to an end with its fifth volume in 2009 (save for a special Blu Ray release in 2012, which I of course got as soon as it came out, but while cool it was just a compilation of the first two volumes of the original standard disc releases). Trailer Trauma is now also up to its fifth volume – 2020’s 70’s Action Attack, which might be my favorite trailer comp of all time given that it focuses, as you might guess from the title, on ‘70s action – but I never got into the Trailer Trauma series much due to its focus on horror. I’m not a fan of ‘70s and ‘80s horror movies, really. Well anyway I was recently watching my Trailer Trauma Blu Ray…only to realize midway through that I never even watched all of it back when I got it. I think I just watched the first half. Well, hell, there was still a predominance of horror stuff on it, but toward the end of the disc there was this crazy trailer in French with people in a cabin in the woods and a long-limbed girl in panties and halter top fighting some guy with a knife, and the title was “Tango Macabre,” so I figured it was just some goofy ‘70s French horror flick. 

But then I happened to read the review of Trailer Trauma at DVD Drive-In, and was surprised to learn that the trailer was the French promo for a Canada-US film from 1974…a film directed, of all people, by Oliver frigggin’ Stone!! So needless to say I had to see it. It’s now out on Blu Ray and that’s how I saw it, but to tell the truth it would’ve been just as well if I hadn’t. Curiously listless, Seizure has a lot of potential, concerning a horror author/artist (Jonathan Frid, from Dark Shadows) hosting a weekend getaway (or something) at his cottage in the verdant French Canadian countryside. But man, for a movie that features the credit, “Herve Villacheze as The Spider,” Seizure never makes much use of its crazy setup. Basically our hero – such as he is – fears that his dreams are becoming reality, and three freaks crawl out of the woodwork and start making hell for him and his guests. Or maybe they’re escaped lunatics from an asylum…or maybe it’s all just a dream! Stone tries to have his cake and eat it, too, but the only problem is he doesn’t spend enough time preparing either (hopefully that lame analogy made sense). 

The movie is lethargically paced, and not helped by the fact that it takes itself too seriously…but then, it is an Oliver Stone picture! He does aim above his minimal trappings with staging that’s unusual for the genre, particularly using a handheld camera at times. So I guess one could see the makings of a future cinema heavyweight here, this being Stone’s first directing credit. And yes, Herve Villechaize is in the film, a few years before Fantasy Island and two years before The Man With The Golden Gun (according to IMDB the movie was filmed in late 1972). His part here seems to be a trial for that latter role, as he essentially plays the henchman of the lunatic chick in charge of the trio (there’s also a hulking black man with a horrifically-scarred face). But man, Stone saddles Villechaize with most of the movie’s dialog, and I had a helluva time understanding what the hell he was saying! It didn’t help that it seemed Stone (who by the way co-wrote the script as well) seemed to have penned this dialog after ingesting the poetry of Jim Morrison. It’s just way over the top, but at least Villechaize acquits himself well. 

The humor comes unintentionally, like the disperate group of “friends” who congregrate here…they spend most of the time fighting and bickering, to the point that you wonder what the hell they’re even doing together. Genre regular Mary Woronov (who appears elsewhere on this review round-up) shines as the young wife of a loudmouth; the two nearly steal the picture. Woronov though gets the honor; she is the aforementioned long-limbed babe in panties and halter top from the trailer, and she appears this way in the final quarter of the film, forced into a knife fight with the Dark Shadows guy. This scene here again shows Oliver Stone’s attempts at getting outside his contraints, with the camera going handheld again and close to the actors; Woronov looks like she’s trying out for the Conan picture (which by the way Oliver Stone also wrote! At least the first draft!), like a sort of ‘70s barbarian babe. She should’ve been the star of the movie. 

Seizure is curiously tame in the sex and violence departments; other than Wornov’s skimpy clothing, there is zero in the way of sex appeal, and no nudity whatsoever. Violence is also minimal, with only occasional bits of blood, and a gruesome bit toward the end where the hulking black villain crushes a guy’s skull (off-camera) with his bare hands, and we get a closeup of his hands afterward and there’s all this chunky goup on it (ie, the brains he just crushed out!). Oh, we also get some animal violence, with a quick cut of a poor dog hanging in the woods. “Quick” is the key word, though; Stone goes for a lot of “shock shots,” with super-quick hits of violence, but they’re so quick that the shock is ruined – like the aforementioned horrifically-scarred face. The first time it’s shown, it’s on-camera so fast you barely even register it. 

Another interesting thing from a modern perspective is that Seizure, like Hollywood Boulevard below, could almost be the work of a modern-day director trying to cater to an old genre form. And not just due to the lack of nudity – see, for example, Rodriguez and Tarantino’s 2007 Grindhouse movies, which slavishly catered to the form but somehow missed the key ingredient of female nudity and were set in the present day for some inexplicable reason – but also due to the film artifacts that occasionally pop up. By this I again refer to Grindhouse, with Rodriguez’s Planet Terror in particular having all kinds of “bad film damage” digitally overlaid. We get almost this same thing in the “horror scenes” in Seizure; there will suddenly be film damage, like bad splices, when characters scream or react to something shocking or whatever. 

Otherwise Seizure was only interesting in that it showed the beginnings of a legendary career. But even “Herve Villechaize as The Spider” couldn’t save it, nor could Mary Woronov in her panties and halter top. 

Death Race 2000 (1975): I remember hearing about this movie all the time as a kid (I was born the year before it came out), so clearly it made some impact on the cultural radar. But, other than seeing bits and pieces on TV over the years, I never actually watched the movie until fairly recently. I’m not sure how well Death Race 2000 is considered now; the trailer does not appear on any of the grindhouse trailer comps I’m familiar with (which is a lot), and this implies to me that genre fans consider it too mainstream. Or maybe no one wants to talk about it due to the lame remake of several years back. (I assume it’s lame; of course, there’s no way in hell I ever intended to watch it.) But man, Death Race 2000 might just be one of the greatest grindhouse/drive-in movies of all time, featuring plentiful action, lots of nudity, and even horror effects courtesy the proto-Darth Vader garb “hero” David Carradine sports as “Frankenstein.” Plus it co-stars Sylvester Stallone!! (And it also features Mary Woronov – who will appear yet again in this review round-up!) 

The movie performs way above expectations and just gets better with age, though I bet it was a helluva lot of fun to watch in a drive-in back in ’75. It’s also a great reminder of how Hollywood once churned out fast-moving pieces of entertainment that didn’t wear out their welcome (the flick’s not even 90 minutes long), and featured plenty of nudity and violence. While the boobs and butts (and bush, in Woronov’s case) are real, the violence is spectacularly fake – the blood is this garish reddish-orange, and the outrageous gore effects are more comical than gut-churning. Limbs getting ripped off, heads getting crushed, etc; it’s all here, and it all looks more slapstick than violent, lending the film even more of a wonderfully dark comic vibe. 

This appears to be mostly due to director Paul Bartel, who cameos (uncredited) in the film as the doctor who attends David Carradine’s character Frankenstein in the beginning of the film. Bartel was known more for acting than directing, and indeed appeared in the following year’s Hollywood Boulevard (below), where he played a pretentious director – a film that included clips from Death Race 2000, adding even more self-referential comedy to a movie already filled with it. His direction here is great, with a rapid pace, steady shots on the big racing scenes (none of the shaky cam or cgi bullshit of today’s movies here), and the droll, blackly comic vibe seems like just the thing his character in Hollywood Boulevard would have done, again giving these two movies a cool sort of in-joke vibe. 

Carradine is very good in his role, underplaying it; he spends most of the movie in a leather costume and cape complete with full face mask. There’s a proto-Darth Vader element to the Frankenstein look, but unlike Vader this guy actually has a libido, so we have the required T&A when Frankenstein gets busy with his navigator, a blonde babe with a brick shithouse bod (Annie, as played by actress Simone Griffeth). Good grief these ‘70s women had it going on. The producers knew their audience; in addition to Griffeth’s frequent nudity, we also have a bit where she, Woronov, and Roberta Collins (as racer Matilda the Hun) get full-body massages in the nude…Woronov’s Calamity Jane and Collins’s Matilda get in a catfight, and we get a half-second confirmation that Woronov is indeed fully naked when she gets up off the massage table to confront Collins’s character. Stallone is also present, seeming quite the calm professional surrounded by all this bare female flesh. 

The dark comedy is perfectly handled and I love that the movie doesn’t play it safe, though I am glad the producers didn’t go all the way and show kids getting run over by the racers – kids and the elderly affording the most “points” when run over during the trans-continental race. That said, there’s none of the pandering a modern-day flick like this would stoop to; Frankenstein, even though he’s our hero, still runs over men and women without even looking upset about it. I’m sure if this movie were made today the hero would be fighting back tears everytime he had to run over someone, or he’d go out of his way to not run over anyone. (Oh, and of course “he” would be “she” if the film were made today!) I also enjoyed the political satire afoot with the guru-like president who openly lies to the populace (loved the running gag that “the French” are behind the attacks on the race, a government cover-up of the resistance movement) and the easy-going government officials who casually tell the racers they can have them killed. 

A year before he became famous for life, Stallone shines as Machine Gun Joe, and I got the impression he was ad-libbing his lines. Being a writer himself, I think it’s very likely Stallone was coming up with his own lines. There is a natural delivery to his performance and he’s clearly having a lot of fun, and from a modern vantage point it’s also fun to see him playing a bad guy for once. Also, where else can you see slender David Carradine beating up burly Sylvester Stallone? Plus there’s a hilarious part where Machine Gun Joe blasts a tommy gun at the audience before the race starts, and Stallone pulls a proto-Rambo grimace while blasting on full auto. There are also hidden storylines in the film for the viewer to ponder, like what exactly is going on between Machine Gun Joe and Frankenstein’s navigator Annie…who, by the way, also seems to have something going on with one of the resistance leaders. 

There’s also a cool postmodern vibe in play with the proto-reality TV element of the race, complete with gabby newscasters giving frequent updates or voiceovers, a la Survivor or The Amazing Race or other such bullshit. One of the newscasters is a pitch-perfect spoof of Walter Kronkite, and the other appears to be a spoof of a Rona Barrett type, a gossip-focused woman whose recurring joke has it that she is a “dear friend” of practically every important character. The entire movie is funny, with really no missteps, but manages to also pack a punch in the frequent action scenes. I mean I know many years ago Vanishing Point was proclaimed as the best of those ‘70s “car movies,” but really Death Race 2000 is better than any of them, and is probably the epitome of a drive-in movie. 

Hollywood Boulevard (1976): I only recently saw this movie for the first time, and couldn’t believe how much I loved it. Previously I was only familiar with the poster for it, and knew that it starred the blonde and lovely, should-have-been-a-huge-star, Candice Rialson. What I did not know was that Hollywood Boulevard was the first film of future heavyweight director Joe Dante (who co-directs with Allan Arkush), who had been cutting trailers for New World (in fact he cut the trailer for Death Race 2000) and who managed to convince Roger Corman to allow him to direct an entire picture. As mentioned above, there is a strange post-modern feeling to this movie…as if it had been made by someone who watched all of the 42nd Street Forever grindhouse trailer DVD compilations and tried to both spoof and pay tribute to the entire drive-in aesthetic. In other words, Hollywood Boulevard is everything Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse wanted to be, with the additional coolness factor that it was actually produced in the ‘70s. 

This one’s an actual comedy, but still manages to pack in action and the required nudity. Surprisingly Rialson isn’t the one showing off the most flesh; surprising because the lady had perhaps the nicest rack in film history. Good grief! Her topless scenes are for the most part tame, usually while quickly disrobing before some off-screen lovin’ (a fun element about the movie is that Rialson’s character “Candy” is more wholesome than promiscuous, and spends the movie with just one guy). Then of course there’s the rape scene. Actually, the rape scenes. Hollywood Boulevard is so “1970s” that a gang-rape is played for laughs twice: first when Candy must act out being raped by a bunch of enemy soldiers in a movie she’s shooting in the Philipines, and later in the movie when the “real” Candy is almost raped by a film projectionist and an audience member who get overly excited watching the aforementioned “fake” rape scene on the big screen. 

Dante and Arkush recycle footage from other New World movies, like the aforementioned Death Race 2000, complete with Candice Rialson wearing David Carradine’s leather Frankenstein costume. Meaning there’s even a cosplay element to the damn movie…that’s how ahead of its time it was! True, the humor is a little slapstick at times…the plot hinges on mysterious deaths plaguing the shooting locations of Miracle Pictures productions (“If it’s a good movie, it’s a Miracle!”), and the flick opens with a parachutist falling to her death – complete with a big Loony Tunes type bodyshaped hole in the ground where she hit…and moments later the producer, lothario P.G., is talking how most actresses would “die” to get in Hollywood. That said, Paul Bartel shines as a pretentious director, with a running gag of him giving “motivation” to the actors for the scene they’re about to play. But Mary Woronov steals the film, playing a bitchy diva and clearly enjoying every minute of it. 

Rialson as ever shines, but her role is limited to basically just being adorable; she is the naïve beauty who just wants to break into pictures, so she doesn’t get much opportunity to steal scenes like the others do. That said, there’s a great meta-fictional bit where her character goes to see her “big debut,” only to have to drive way outside of L.A., where the movie is playing on a triple-bill at a drive-in, and Candy gets progressively drunk and dispirited as she watches herself on the big screen…leading to that aforementioned rape scene. Oh, and Dick Miller also steals the show as Candy’s agent Walter Paisely (a character name Dick Miller often played), complete with running gags about former clients – the movie rewards multiple viewings, as in Dick Miller’s first scene he’s complaining that he’s just lost one of his big clients, a friggin’ elephant, and in a later scene, while Candy’s waiting in the car for a bank robbery that she thinks is a movie scene but isn’t, you can hear the commercial for a movie starring an elephant on her car radio. 

There’s actually a lot of meta humor throughout Hollywood Boulevard; when Candy gets her first gig with Miracle Pictures, Walter gives her directions and tells her to “take the Slauson Cutoff.” Anyone who watched Johnny Carson will get that one. Former Monster Kid Dante also inserts a lot of references to the old horror flicks, with Rialson even posing over the Hollywood star of Bela Lugosi in the opening credits. The direction is miles beyond typical drive-in fodder, with a lot of visual gags; the plot gradually concerns a killer stalking the Miracle Pictures crew, and in one memorable sequence the masked killer slashes a victim with a blade, and we cut immediately to barbecuse sauce dripping off Walter’s chicken onto a newspaper headline about the murder. Another part has P.G. about to get it on with two lovely actresses at the same time, and we get a quick cut to the foam erupting from a beer can someone’s popped the tab on. This is in addition to the visual cues to genre films, like for example the clear tribute to Mario Bava in a late scene where the killer stalks prey on a darkened, fogswept movie lot. I’m not as familiar with the work of Allan Arkush, but one can clearly see the seeds of Joe Dante’s future work here; the movie is just as much a tribute to the genre as his later unsung piece Matinee was to its genre. 

Almost all drive-in genres are spoofed: women in prison, women with guns, car races, giallo-type thrillers, etc.  Godzilla is even here, courtesy a guy who randomly enough is wearing the costume during one of the shoots – leading to another of those goofy gags, where Godzilla gets up off a toilet (which for some reason is sitting in a field in the middle of a shooting location) and throws the script he’s reading into the bowl. Again, the movie is very much both tribute and spoof of the stuff one thinks of when one thinks “drive-in movie,” spoofing the exact sort of thing you see in the various grindhouse trailer compilations out there; indeed, I recall reading that Joe Dante was involved with the Alamo Drafthouse’s 2012 compilation Trailer War, which is one of the best drive-in compilations out there. 

But whereas Matinee was a love letter to a long-gone time, Hollywood Boulevard is a time capsule of a long-gone time; when Candy, her boyfriend, and Walter go to the drive-in theater to see Candy’s movie, we have a long sequence of the experience. It’s obviously done for comedy, with most of the audience drunk, rowdy, and horny, but at the same time it allows us in the modern day to experience what it might have been like in the era. This for me is the highlight of the film; you almost feel like you are there with the three characters. It’s a fun scene, complete with Candice Rialson apparently getting drunk for real. One part that really cracked me up was the sound effects on the film playing in the background; when they watch Candy’s Philipines-shot flick “Machete Maidens,” there’s a quick shot of the movie screen, showing a girl being whipped by another woman; a scene taken from The Big Doll House. The camera cuts back to the trio in the car, but you can still hear the movie in the background, and the girl getting whipped sounds like she’s enjoying it. It’s been years since I saw The Big Doll House (I plan to watch it again soon), but I suspect this audio was newly added by Dante and Arkush. 

There’s also a lot of great dialog in it, most of it again genre-referential. Like when one of the characters is killed in the Philipines and someone says to call the cops, and Mary Woronov (who plays “Mary,” just like Candice Rialson plays “Candy,” adding more of a meta nature to the flick) deadpans: “This is the Philipines. There are no police.” One could clearly come to that conclusion after watching the Philipines-shot action movies of the ‘70s. My only complaint is that sometimes the comedy gets too broad, at least in the callous played-for-laughs reactions to various deaths. There’s also a curious bit a little over halfway through where the crew is about to shoot a 1950s film, but it’s just as abruptly dropped; one gets the impression it was inserted for time. I read that Hollywood Boulevard was shot in a mere ten days, for under sixty thousand dollars, but you’d never guess it, as it’s genuinely a quality film, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Doomsday Warrior #18: American Dream Machine

Doomsday Warrior #18: American Dream Machine, by Ryder Stacy

July, 1990  Zebra Books

What can I say about this penultimate volume of Doomsday Warrior? That it’s incredibly stupid? That it’s the worst volume of the series yet? That it’s a sort-of rip off of Total Recall with a little Dune thrown in? That Ryder Syvertsen has clearly stuck a fork in the series and has entirely lost all interest in it? No matter what I say, I won’t be able to properly convey how ultimately terrible American Dream Machine really is. 

Well, one positive thing I can say is that it doesn’t rip off the previous volume, which itself was a ripoff of the volume before that. For this one, Syvertsen goes way back to the tenth volume to rip himself off; for, just as that tenth volume was an “imaginary story” that had no bearing on the overarching storyline, so too is American Dream Machine an “imaginary story” that, for the most part, has nothing whatsoever to do with Doomsday Warrior. This volume also has the first real appearance of Kim Langford in the series since…well, since that imaginary story in #10: American Nightmare, I think, with the additional similarity that the “Kim” who shows up in American Dream Machine is also an imaginary figure, same as she was in that earlier “imaginary story.” 

Turns out I was correct when I guessed that there’d be no pickup from the closing events of the previous volume, which as we’ll recall ended with Rockson and his team still not having reached a neighboring city, where they hoped to gather resources needed to rebuild a ravaged Century City. There was also some stuff about a bunch of new recruits Rockson had to train. Absolutely none of that is even mentioned here. When we meet Rockson, he’s flying a commandeered “Sov” fighter jet, soaring west to meet up with pal Archer, whom Rockson hasn’t seen “in three years.” 

Yes, friends, three years have passed since the previous volume; it’s now “around 2096,” we’re told (Syvertsen has also thrown in the towel on pinning down when exactly the books take place), and boy it turns out a whole bunch of stuff has happened since last time. For one, the US and the USSR has entered a truce, with all occupying Soviet forces having withdrawn from the United States(!), though we’re informed that there are still guerrilla bands of Russian fighters out there who haven’t gotten the message. Chief among them would be Killov, who we are told without question is still alive (though he doesn’t appear this time), and also Zhabnov, onetime ruler of Moscow who hasn’t been seen for several volumes; both men have a mad-on hatred for Rockson and are determined to kill him. 

Not only that, but we’re told that President Langford is now the official, uh, President of the reformed US, but he’s so old and frail he’s in a wheelchair now…and gee, the reader must only assume it’s due to fallout from the brainwashing torture he endured back in #16: American Overthrow, a subplot Syvertsen never did follow up on. Also, we’re told that Kim, Langford’s hotstuff daughter, is in the reformed DC with her dad, where she plans parties and stuff – and Rockson figures he’ll “never see her again.” As for Rockson’s other “true love,” Amazonian redhead Rona, she too is out of the picture, off in some other liberated city. We also get the random note that Detroit, the black member of the Rock Squad, has been assigned by Langford to be the Ambassador to Russia, and given that Premiere Vassily is now so old and incompetent, the USSR is actually being run by his Ethiopian servant, Rahallah (who also doesn’t appear – we’re just told all this stuff). So, Rockson muses as he flies along in his fighter jet, the world is essentially run by two black men: Detroit and Rahallah. 

But man, all this is well established at the point that this story begins…it’s news to us readers, but it’s been Rockson’s world for the past three years. Indeed, things are so slow now that mountain man Archer plain left Century City three years ago, bored with the lack of fighting…and Rockson just heard from him for the first time, having received an urgent fax from Archer that Archer needs help! So there are a lot of problems here already…I mean, Archer has ever and always been an idiot, his bumbling stupidity a constant joke in the series. How the hell did this dude learn how to send a fax? And for that matter, since when did he even know how to write? 

Beyond that, though…I mean Rockson receives this urgent “Help!” message, and just all by himself hops in this “Sov” fighter and heads for Archer’s remote destination. No backup, no “new Rock Team” (we also learn Russian guy Sherasnksy has gone back to Russia…but Chen and McLaughlin are still in Century City, at least), just Rockson going solo for no other reason than plot convenience. And even here we get the series mandatory “man against nature” stuff, with Rockson crash landing in rough terrain and then having to escape a giant mutant spider…just “yawn” type stuff after 18 volumes of it. 

The entire concept of Archer having been gone for three years isn’t much followed up on; Rockson and the big mountain man are soon drinking beer and shooting the shit in the bowling alley Archer now calls home(!). There’s also a new character to the series – the absurdly-named Zydeco Realness, an elfin “Techno-survivor,” ie yet another new mutant race, this one having survived the past century in silos, hence their small nature and weird manner of speaking. Also, Ryder Syvertsen has discovered the word “diss,” which mustv’e come into the parlance around this time (I probably learned the word from the Beastie Boys at the time); Zydeco’s people are obsessed with being “dissed,” and will take affront if they even think they are being dissed. Rockson has never heard the word before, and Syvertsen has it that it’s a word the Tecno-survivors have created themselves. 

The titular “Dream Machine” is a device the Techno-survivors have created for people who are about to die…sort of like that bit in Soylent Green where you could have like a sensory experience on your way through the out door. So off the trio go, riding over 50 miles of rough terrain – but wait, I forgot! Rockson actually gets laid…indeed, quite a bit in this novel. But again demonstrating the marked difference between this and the earliest volumes, all the sex is off-page…well, most of it. The few tidbits we get here and there are so vague as to be laughable when compared to the juicy descriptions found many volumes ago. But Rockson makes his way through a few green-skinned wild women, of the same tribe he last, er, mated with back in…well, I think it was the ones way back in #3: The Last American. 

It's curious that Syvertsen often refers to earlier volumes in American Dream Machine, more so than in any past installment; we are reminded of how long ago certain events were. But then he goes and makes the rest of the novel completely unrelated from the series itself. Anyway, I realized toward the end of the book that Syvertsen was indulging in this reminiscence because he must have known the end was near, as by the end of the book you know we’re headed for a series resolution. However I’m getting ahead of myself. As mentioned instead of any series continuity, we instead get a bonkers plot that rips off Total Recall to a certain extent…which must’ve been quite a trick given that the movie hadn’t come out yet when Syvertsen was writing his manuscript. Or maybe it was the Total Recall novelization, published in hardcover in 1989, that inspired him. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maybe it was just the original Philip K. Dick story. 

So Rockson gets in the Dream Machine, which looks like a big metal coffin, and sure enough as soon as he’s under none other than Zhabnov and his forces storm in – completely coincidentally! – and they take everyone prisoner. And when Zhabnov discovers Rockson in this machine, he has the Techo-survivors turn the dream into a nightmare. For the next hundred-plus pages we’ll be in this nightmare world, which is where the similarity to previous volume American Nightmare comes in…just as with that one, this one too will be a “nightmare” with no bearing on the main plot of the series, with even Rockson himself a completely different character. 

That’s because he’s now “Niles Rockson,” a wealthy playboy living in a penthouse in NYC in the pre-nuke 1980s, enjoying a romantic time with hotstuff blonde “Kimetta.” None other than the dream version of Kim Langford, with the curious tidbit that, despite having been plain ignored for the past several volumes, Kim is now presented as Rock’s soul mate, the love of his life. Well anyway when the nightmare begins…Kim suddenly becomes a mean-looking tough chick (still hot though, we’re informed – with, uh, big boobs despite her small stature!), and the action has been changed to…Venus! 

Suddenly Kimetta is angry at Rockson, meaning the dream has changed but Rockson of course is not aware he’s in a dream; reading the novel is a very frustrating experience. And it gets dumber. Some cops come in and haul Rockson off for the crime of being a “playboy!” He’s put on a “prisoner ship” and sent off into space, headed for the artificial planet Esmerelda, which is a prison colony. Yet, despite this being a nightmare, Rockson – in the narrative concocted by the Techno-survivors at the behest of Zhabnov – still gets laid. A lot. Hookers are sent into his room each night, a different one each night, and every time it’s fade to black. One of the gals happens to be from Esmerelda, the planet they’re headed for, and since Rockson’s so good in bed (we’re informed), she treats him to “the Esmereldan position.” Demonstrating how juvenile the tone of Doomsday Warrior has become, Syvertsen actually describes this screwing-in-a-weird-new-position thusly: “It would be difficult to explain.” And that’s all he writes about it. 

We’re in straight-up sci-fi territory as Rockson is taken to this planet Esmerelda…where he learns he’s going to become a gladiator. And at least sticking true to the series template he’ll need to fight a bloodthirsty monster in the arena. It’s all so dumb…and, well, at least it’s dreamlike, with non-sequitur stuff like Kimetta – who now has become the daughter of the prison warden on Esmerelda! – giving Rockson a talisman that will protect him against this monster. It just goes on and on, having nothing to do with Doomsday Warrior, yet not being strong enough to retain the reader’s interest; Syvertsen’s boredeom with it all is very apparent, and this feeling extends to the reader. 

At the very least I was impressed with how Syvertsen just wings it as he goes along…given that all this is a “dream,” he’s able to change the narrative as he sees fit. But gradually Rockson starts to figure something is amiss with this world, and begins to remember “The Doomsday Warrior.” But again it’s very juvenile, with Rockson suddenly certain that if he escapes Esmerelda, he will awaken into his real reality. The finale of the dream sequence features some unexpected emotional depth, when Rockson realizes that his beloved Kimetta is “just a dream, too.” This leads to a sequence where the series gets back to its New Agey roots; The Glowers, those godlike mutants also last seen in the third volume, show up to save Rockson – who is near death from his experience. This kind of goes on for a bit, with the Glowers and Rockson’s pals using a Medicine Wheel to put Rockson’s soul back together with his body. 

Here's where it becomes clear Ryder Syvertsen has the end of the series in mind. Well, first we get more juvenile stuff where the Glowers bring out a massive ship made of ice and snow and upon it floats Rockson and team back to Century City – where the Glowers have called ahead telepathically. Rockson is given a hero’s welcome, and what’s more Rona and Kim are there waiting for him, and we’re told they’ve “settled their jealous differences” about Rockson, and have decided what to do about him – but will tell him more later. The main Glower announces that Killov is alive, and only Rockson can stop him, thus setting the stage for the next (and final) volume. 

But man…here comes the scene we’ve waited so many volumes for: that night there’s a knock at Rockson’s door, and he opens it to find both Kim and Rona there in negligees, and they laugh and push Rockson back on his bed, and the reader is promised the Doomsday Warrior three-way to end all three-ways. But friggin’ Ryder Syvertsen ends the book right there!! (I’m currently working on my own 200-page fan novelization of this sex scene.) 

As mentioned, the next volume is to be the last…but the series has been over for Syvertsen for a long time, now. That said, I might get to the last one sooner rather than later, for American Dream Machine seems to be leading directly to that next novel – meaning, the next one shouldn’t open three years after this one.