Tag Archives: Terminator

Showdown In Screamtown: Frightful Four & Chilling Championship

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This is it, boys and ghouls!

Only four competitors, and two matches, remain for our semi-finals round.

The monsters who survive those matches will need to step back into the ring tonight so that our champion can be crowned.

Godzilla may be known as King of the Monster, but tonight we’re going to crown the World Heavyweight Champion of Monsters!

SEMI-FINALS MATCH ONE: DRACULA (1) vs PREDATOR (7)

VS

Predator has had some time to lick his wounds or, more accurately, pours that really unpleasant burning powder on them to expedite healing. But Drac, sensing weakness, wastes little time in transforming into Bat-Beast mode, and going right for the jugular (figuratively and literally).

He gets his fangs sunk in, but glowing green blood tastes a bit like the stuff inside of glow sticks to Dracula. This throws the vampire king off his game, allowing the hunter to become an intergalactic Van Helsing.

Predator thrusts his metal wrist-blades into Drac’s chest. Then with two big slashes, he uses the same weapon to take off Dracula’s head, and take his spot in our Main Event,

WINNER: PREDATOR (7)

 

SEMI-FINALS MATCH TWO: THE WOLFMAN (2) vs THE TERMINATOR (6)

VS

Even with just one useful leg and one arm (period) our resident Killing Machine is able to pound the taste out of the Wolfman’s mouth. However, unlike Leatherface, Wolfie heals up almost immediately and goes on the offensive.

The Howling Horror gets right to ripping and tearing wires and hydraulics out of every joint he can find. The cybernetic super punches eventually begin losing the power behind them, and the metal endo-skeleton is soon immobilized and rendered little more than a shiny lawn sculpture.

For the coup de gras, the Wolfman digs into the brain chip slot that has already been scratched and softened up in the previous rounds. Once that little piece of silicon is pulled free, it’s light out for the glowing red eyes of the Terminator. With a mighty howl at the moon, Wolfie charges into the championship match.

WINNER: THE WOLFMAN (2)

 

CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH: THE WOLFMAN (2) vs PREDATOR (7)

VS

And now we come to our Main Event! The final clash of terrifying titans that we’ve all been waiting for.

This one gets bloody quickly, soon turning into a true war of attrition. Both beasts scour, stab, and tear with claws, teeth, and blades as the ring becomes a lake of gore. After a ferocious battle, both combatants fall to their knees and drag themselves off to separate corners.

But there’s one thing that Predator didn’t consider. A twist that he should have seen coming: Only silver can kill a werewolf. So the Wolfman heals up, and rises back to his feet.

He doesn’t move in for the kill right away, as even the most bestial of creatures can recognize a worthy adversary. Predator returns the respect, knowing this has been his last hunt. He rises back to his feet, stands on shaky legs, and nods at his opponent. Wolfman dashes across the ring in the blink of an eye, and makes the kill quickly.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE WINNER AND NEWWWWWWWWW WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF MONSTERS: THE WOOOOOOOOOLFMAAAAAAAAAAN!!!

I hope you enjoyed reading about this tournament as much as I enjoyed writing it. Maybe I’ll try to come up with something similar in the near-future.

In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

And don’t forget to pick-up my latest novel: What Lies At Baelwood Manor

 

Showdown In Screamtown Round Two: The Evil Eight

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It’s time for our mighty monsters to get back in the ring and square off once again to decide who is the baddest of them all!

This group of eight have survived and advanced through one brutal round, now let’s see if they have enough left to move onto the Frightful Four semi-final round.

MATCH ONE: DRACULA (1) vs THE THING (12)

VS

Top-seeded Dracula hasn’t had easy matchups in this tournament, first having to deal with the interdimensional horror of Pennywise, and now facing off with the cosmic terror of The Thing.

Thingie goes right to trick that helped him upset Jason V in Round One, this time taking on the shape of Drac’s long-dead love Elisabeta (for those who forget, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula the titular bloodsucker is super into Mina Harker because she is the reincarnation of he aforementioned Elisabeta). It’s all for nought, though, as Drac immediately sees through the charade, and he’s pretty pissed at his opponent for taking such a low blow.

The grandaddy of all vampires goes all-out, and starts tearing pieces off The Thing. This, of course, only creates more problems for Drac, as every piece he tears off now attacks him. He ends up reaching deep into his bag of tricks and calls upon the creature of the night in the neighborhood. After all the rats and wolves and owls tote every piece of Thingie out of the arena, Dracula is the one left standing in the ring.

WINNER: DRACULA (1)

 

MATCH TWO: THE WOLFMAN (2) vs PINHEAD (9)

VS

Our resident Cenobite is feeling irrationally confident, considering he defeated a little girl in Round One, but Wolfie doesn’t care about that. Pinhead tried to S&M his opponent to death, but every inflicted wound heals almost instantly.

The Wolfman start pulling every nail out of Pinny’s head with his claws and, suddenly, the match changes from a fight to something far sexier (at least as far as Pinhead is concerned). After turning Pinhead into Plain Old Head, Wolfie starts tearing chunks out of the senior hellraiser’s pale body.

Pinhead is loving every second of it. He’s long ago ceased fighting back and, by the time he’s lying on the ground moaning loudly, covered in blood and….other fluids…the ref stops the match. The ring crew are used to mopping up gore, but they didn’t really sign up for this. So Pinhead is politely, but firmly, asked to leave the arena immediately.

WINNER: THE WOLFMAN (2)

 

MATCH THREE: FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER (3) vs PREDATOR (7)

VS

This match is a completely different affair for both these guys. Predator faces off against the exact opposite of an inquiring scientific mind in The Creature, while Frank himself stands across from an enemy who – being unsure whether The Creature is a worthwhile hunt – doesn’t make the first move.

Eventually, Frankenstein’s Monster snarls and moves in for the attack, leading to Predator going invisible and stabbing away from all angles with his wrist-blades. Frank takes a lot of damage, but he’s able to take it in-stride until he gets his hands on P-Diddy. His tech takes the brunt of the attack, so the invisibility strategy doesn’t last much longer.

Frankie comes at the Big Game Space Hunter like a freight train, making the latter starts wishing that the nuke on his forearm wasn’t banned from the tournament (along with all firearms). Instead, he relies on his superior speed and agility to cut Frank down piece-by-piece. The Creature wants to continue but, seeing that his limbs are no longer functioning, the match is stopped.

WINNER: PREDATOR (7)

 

MATCH FOUR: LEATHERFACE (4) vs THE TERMINATOR (6)

VS

This would have been a quick win for the literal Killing Machine in round one, since a chainsaw isn’t much use against a cyborg. But the acid bath and claw massage that the Alien Queen gave him in Round One has left the T-800 in really rough shape.

Leatherface goes to work on the parts that are already damaged, and saws through the exposed gears and wires on every body part he can get at. With the Terminator on the ground, Leatherface really leans his chainsaw into the slot that hold’s his opponent’s brain chip. This ends up being a mistake for the Texas BBQ Master.

The inexplicably Austrian-accented robot manages to grab Leatherface by the throat with his lone functional hand, and snaps his neck with one good twist. He struggles to his feet, dragging one useless leg behind him, and gets that one remaining hand raised in victory.

WINNER: THE TERMINATOR (6)

 

That leaves our Frightful Four semi-finals bouts looking like this:

Dracula (1) vs Predator (7)

The Wolfman (2) vs The Terminator (6)

Since there’s only a grand total of three matches left, we’ll also cover our Chilling Championship match in the next post.

So tune in then to see who is left standing when the dust settles on the Showdown In Screamtown!

 

 

Showdown In Screamtown Round One: The Satanic Sixteen

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The competitors are in the arena.

The matches have been booked.

The introductions have been made.

The crowd is amped up and ramped up.

So, without further delay, let’s get ready to rumble!

MATCH ONE: DRACULA (1) vs PENNYWISE (16)

VS

A classic match-up of Old School Ghoul versus New School Ghoul. They would appear to be pretty evenly paired as far as physical strength goes, but it doesn’t take long for an old veteran to spot the upstart’s weakness.

The fact is that Pennywise’s power is predicated on fear, which is why he primarily hunts children. So, unless Pennywise can transform into a crucifix or a sunrise, Drac isn’t going to fear him very much.

Without being able to charge up on fear juice, the killer clown is just as doomed against one nosferatu as he was against seven preteens.

WINNER: DRACULA (1)

 

MATCH TWO: THE WOLFMAN (2) vs FRED KRUEGER (15)

VS

If this fight takes place purely in the real world, the Wolfman tears through Kruger as quickly as if the latter were nothing more than the slice of pizza that he resembles. But Fred is canny enough to find a way to take their battle into dreamland, where he’ll have home field advantage.

At this point, though, Fred runs into a similar problem as Pennywise did. He killed children in life and teens in post-life, and he was damn good at it. But Wolfie is a grown-ass man and his subconscious, where Krueger has found much success against insecure pubescents, has a grown-ass monster wolf prowling about in it. Old Freddy Knife-Fingers looses in both realms.

WINNER: THE WOLFMAN (2)

 

MATCH THREE: FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER (3) vs MICHAEL MYERS (14)

VS

Michael is far more aggressive, and has racked up a far greater body count that the Creature over the years. I mean, Frank would rather babysit a little girl than stalk and kill her babysitter and said-babysitter’s school chums.

So the murderous Shatner fanboy would come out swinging…or stabbing, I suppose. He’ll put a bunch of holes in the Creature, but Dr. Frankenstein knows how to construct a damn durable dude. It took a flaming collapsing windmill to put the Creature down once, and they had to explode a whole castle laboratory around him to stop him the second time.

Eventually, Capt. Boltneck will get fed up and toss Michael into the river like he was a little girl picking flowers.

WINNER: FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER (3)

 

MATCH FOUR: LEATHERFACE (4) vs ZOMBIE (13)

VS

In our shortest, and most lopsided, match of the night the zombie hungrily inquires “Brains?” to which Leatherface – thinking the undead a snob for only wanting to eat the caviar of the human body – fires up his chainsaw and promptly turns his opponent into rotten cold cuts.

WINNER: LEATHERFACE (4) 

 

MATCH FIVE: JASON VOORHEES (5) vs THE THING (12)

VS

Neigh-invulnerable and strong as hell, Jason would jump out on The Thing fast early on. He’ll be hacking and slashing his way to an early victory before Thingie figure our how to use his greatest strength to his advantage. In a stunning twist, it’s revealed that The Thing located Pamela Voorhees and absorbed her corpse prior to the match!

Since Jason is not one to chop up mama, he stops his attack. This allows all the pieces that JayJay already hacked off to attack him from all sides, leaving the primary mass of alien ass-kickery to finish the job. And, just like that, we have our first upset of the night!

WINNER: THE THING (12)

 

MATCH SIX: THE TERMINATOR (6) vs ALIEN QUEEN (11)

VS

With guns, the Terminator makes short work of our royal xenomorph. But, as laid out in our previous entry, no guns are allowed here, so the Austrian Android has to get down and dirty in this fight.

Queenie would scrape off much of Schwarzenator’s synthetic flesh with her claws but, as designed, the murder machine will keep coming after her. This one gets nasty, as Queen Xeno gets torn apart limb-from-limb. But she does nearly as much damage to the Terminator as her acid blood burns through flesh and metal alike.

In the end, the Bionic Bludgeoner finishes the job, but he’ll be in really rough shape for Round Two.

WINNER: THE TERMINATOR (6)

 

MATCH SEVEN: PREDATOR (7) vs BRUNDLEFLY (10)

VS

We’re rolling with the half-transformed Brundlefly here, so he’s still got much of his genius intellect intact. While one might think that’s an advantage here, it’s actually quite the opposite. Brundlefly has a very inquisitive mind, hence his ill-fated teleportation experiment, so he wouldn’t be able to resist asking Predator a million questions about his physiology, his homeworld, his likes and hobbies, and so forth.

The only reason Big P waits so long to tear out his opponent’s spine is because he’s not sure whether to actually consider him a threat. Ultimately, he decided that he may die of boredom if this continues, and so he adds a human/fly hybrid to his trophy collection.

WINNER: PREDATOR

 

MATCH EIGHT: REAGAN MACNEIL (8) vs PINHEAD (9)

VS

This is a tricky one because it’s entirely possible that Pazuzu – the demon possessing Reagan – is actually Pinhead’s boss. That aside, both take a keen interest in torturing poor Reagan and, as a result, Pinhead ends up victorious.

WINNER: PINHEAD (9)

And with that, our Round Two match-ups look like this:

Dracula (1) vs The Thing (12)

The Wolfman (2) vs Pinhead (9)

Frankenstein’s Monster (3) vs Predator (7)

Leatherface (4) vs The Terminator (6)

Tune in next time to see the results of Round Two: The Evil Eight!

On Time Travel & Terminators

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Terminator Genisys opens on July 1st and, while I am cautiously optimistic that it will be good, I am certainly going to use the opportunity to discuss the use of time travel in entertainment.

I’m no quantum physicist – sorry to disappoint – so I’ll be giving a bit of a layman’s take on the three most frequently used types of time travel. Of course there have been many other types used here and there, but I’ll be focusing on the ones that seem to be the most recurrent. The Terminator film franchise had really made use of all three types, which is why I’ll be using that as a jumping off point.

I will be referring to the theories here as the the Infinite Loop, the Running River and the Parallel Timelines theory.  Not exactly scientific terminology but I find them to be fitting, so let’s just roll with it.

The Terminator goes with the Infinite Loop theory, which essentially states that time is a circle. Everything that will ever happen has already happened and will happen again and again and again. Specifically in this case, John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother Sarah Connor from a Terminator sent back to kill her by Skynet, and then Reese ends up becoming John’s father.

The suggestion here is that Reese was always John’s father, and so the future and the past have always been set in stone. By the end of the movie, Judgment Day – the nominal nuclear destruction of the human race – has not been averted. So, humanity is blasted, John Connor leads the rebellion against the machines, Skynet sends a Terminator back in time, John sends Reese back in time to protect his mother, and the events of the film continue on an infinite cycle.

The Infinite Loop is typically used in tragic stories, as it plays with the notion of unavoidable fate always trumping free will. This is why it’s the theory favored by the fairly nihilistic Rust “time is a flat circle” Cohle in True Detective, and Battlestar “all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again” Galactica.

T2 switches gears and uses “no fate but what we make” as it driving mantra. I’m going to skip the details of the film since, if you haven’t seen it, then I’m sure you’ve already stopped ready this blog post. The bottom line is that Sarah Connor, the super annoying preteen version of her son John, and a Terminator fresh off a babyface turn (wrasslin’ reference alert) decide to go ahead and stop Judgment Day from ever happening.

It’s not made clear whether they succeeded in the theatrical release, but several of the home video versions have a deleted epilogue where an elderly Sarah Connor is playing with her grandkids in a park. All of which suggests that Judgment Day was, in fact, averted.

This is the Running River theory, called such since a good analogy for it is that, if a river’s course is diverted at any point, then every point that flows after that affected point is changed as well. However, it is still the same river. This theory is used in stories with happier endings, as it illustrates that we can change our future for the better. The best example of this is perhaps Back To The Future, wherein Marty McFly changes his family’s life for the better after a brief, reverse-Oedipal wracked, visit to his parents’ past.

Terminator 3 flipped back to the Infinite Loop theory and, while I wouldn’t mind blogging about how that movie get a bad rap and is actually pretty good, it would be superfluous to go further into it.

Terminator Salvation, also better than its reputation though still not especially good, doesn’t really have much to do with time travel. As such, I’m going to twist the facts here to get to my last point. It could be interpreted as saying that the future (or the present, I suppose) may not be the same as it once was. In fact, it may be an entirely different timeline.

Parallel Timelines have long been the theory of choice for ongoing stories. DC  and Marvel Comics have had several “Event Series” and one or two movies that stemmed from this version of time travel. Buffy The Vampire Slayer had a great episode titled Dopplegangland, where a vampire version of Willow crosses over the the “Prime” timeline.  That’s a good specific example of why comic books favor his method – because it allows for different versions of characters to interact with one another. It also enables them with to do things with – and to – famous characters that they otherwise couldn’t (for primarily economic reasons).

The broader explanation for Parallel Timelines is that anytime someone goes back in time and changes something, a whole new future is created from that point forward. The original timeline still exists, adhering to the Infinite Loop rules, but the new timeline essentially falls under Running River rules. But, again, that timeline has not been changed. A new one has simply been created.

Looper, an awesome time travel movie that you should see if you haven’t yet, sits on the fence between Parallel Timelines and Running River, but I always interpreted it more as the former than the latter. The underseen Source Code is a better pure example of Parallel Timelines, where soldier/lab rat Colter Stevens is continually sent back in time to try and stop a terrorist attack on a  train. This theory can be bittersweet, as it allows for a happy ending in one timeline, but you know that things still turn out crappy in the others.

The Parallel Timelines theory of time travel actually plays off of a similar philosophical theory. The philosophy states that, to keep it as brief as possible, every decision that every living being makes creates its own distinct timeline. I’m rather fond of this theory, but it would take another couple thousand words to get into.

To bring things full circle, or back to the start of this particular Infinite Loop, Terminator Genisys opens on July 1st and I’m going to check it out. Looks like they’re throwing together a grab bag of every time travel theory mentioned above, and so it may be an unholy mess. But I’m never one to pass on a time travel movie, so I’ll be there.

Thanks for indulging my crackpot take, I’ll be back soon with some news about my own works, so keep readin’!