I.. Am. Dismayed.
Dismayed and adrift.
Dismayed, adrift, unseen and ignored.
What brought me to this lowly state? Why, I’ll tell you. ON NO LESS THAN NINE OCCASIONS has Hollywood passed on my Kiplingesque treatment of nature by making Cocaine Bear…an insult I have not seen and will not see, but the pain, the sting, the barb was my own colleague, my own ‘alma fratelli’ if-you-will, here at RR, Devon Pack, completely ignoring the CV of his own teammate in his review of the aforementioned travesty. Here is an excerpt, and please, do not harass Devon on social media, while I am hurt I’m sure it was mere oversight, still, my stoic professionalism aside, you’ll see why I’m so upset.
“There’s a bear, that finds cocaine, and then proceeds on a drug fueled spree of freestyle amputations and maulings. You knew what this film was about. Before this film, I was whimsically speculating upon the sequels, upon a franchise: Methamphetamine Cougar, Fentanyl Eagle, Ayahuasca Aardvark. Watching the film, I enjoyed the final credits the most, because they told me that the film was almost over.”
I mean, what the frick was that, man?! Everybody knows or should know I submitted nine scripts in that exact vein, and was turned down. Talk about salt in the wound.
…and not even a mention of my early life trauma selling Amway trying to get them made.
It was an obvious oversight, certainly. A huge, perhaps glaring, oversight, but me and Devon are cool, I mean, we were in a competitive cup-stacking league for a while (the “Hand Solos”, regional quarterfinalists, good times), and while he was careful not to use any of my scripts by name in his review, I can’t help but feel a little slighted.
So, to prevent this malfeasance from happening again, I will reopen the wound and reveal to the world why I will never see the personal fish-slap called Cocaine Bear…ever.
Girlboss, Girlboss, Yes, you’ll show a third quarter loss, But that’s just what happens see, When you invest in equity. It’s all good, it’s okay, Who needs money anyway?
See, it’s not just about pairing ‘a’ drug with ‘a’ animal, but about pairing the right drug with the right animal, that’s what the pharma-zoologiocal genre is all about. Devon pitches a few ideas in his review and to the truly experienced, those writers immersed in Pharm-Zoo, there’s problems with his right away:
Methamphetamine Cougar: Sounds like a movie about Sandra Bullock prowling college bars, yoinked on phen-phen,.
Fentanyl Eagle: I had an early treatment similar called Heroin Hawk, but there was no second act and the Fentanyl thing will make it hard to play in China.
Ayahuasca Aardvark: This one feels like it has legs but getting an African termite eater into the Central American jungle feels like pages wasted. I’d go ‘tapir’, then a B-story with a bunch of naked Indian chicks in it.
So, here is my fully-written and polished reasons for not getting laid in my twenties (and the first two years of my thirties):
Viagra Dolphin: A group of unsuspecting, scuba-diving cheerleaders are beset upon by a horde of fully-erect bottle-nosed hooligans who have the time of their squeaky lives cornering the girls and just, I mean, just goin’ to town. Heavy nod to Deliverance but more comedy, there’s a lot of ‘me-too’ navel gazing in it to get it by the woke-a-nostra, but I’m thinking Jenna Ortega for lead, is she…how’s she look in a bikini?
Prozac Badger: A badger terrorizes a schoolyard until one of the kids on the short bus offer him a rainbow of pills, before you know it, he’s the most copacetic badger in town, and smart, he’s like Benji but with a kill count, walkin’ through the halls, horrifying stodgy old Mrs. Beansworth, until the school goat is found painfully torn to shreds, he, of course, is blamed, (white supremacy?) forcing him back into his den to ween off the drugs and resume being the ankle-crushing terror-rat that he is.
Steroid Hippo: An ambitious British engineer attempts to build a bridge across two hundred miles of wet African terrain until one of the local ‘residents’ discovers a crate of anabolic steroids (smuggler’s plane went down, they hid the drugs in watermelons) now the engineer is greeted with harrowing screams in the night as his workers are attacked, chewed on without penetration then spat back out, their bones like bags of chicklets. Great set pieces, too, with the roid rage hippos cutting a wake in the water as they chase the engineer’s tiny boat, shaky close-ups of angry hippo faces bleeding from the nostril.
Modafinil Sloth: These unproductive lay-abouts get a new lease on life when one of them discovers a derelict shipment of trucker pills. They’re like Rumpelstiltskin except they don’t demand your first born, soon everyone in the local village has a sloth for a butler, with sloths mowing the lawn and darning their socks. That is, until a white man discovers them and tries to take the modafinil sloths to be slave labor in his gas factory (typical), with the last trucker pills going for the final fight to chase off the interlopers so they can return to their idyllic, but painfully slow, way of life.
Lithium Wolverine: Like Prozac Badger he’s a ferocious nuisance made whole by a mood stabilizer but instead of laughs it’s a three-hour lament on the desperate loneliness of modern urban life. He gets a job, goes on some bad dates, develops a wicked nasal spray addiction until he asks himself is he really any better off now than he was as the feral murder-coon he used to be. No. No he is not. Lithium gets flushed and so begins a city-wide spree of revenge against every surly Arab food vendor and pompous maitre d’ in town, then only to be shot down in the street while his secretary weeps, begging the cops to have mercy, and with his last moment he realizes…she was the only one who really loved him.
Side Effects of Charlie’s Angels (2019) may include: the random scapegoating of men, bleeding eyes, sprained cringe muscles, vanishing patience with feminism, schadenfreude at the disaster it was to become, loss of pity for it’s director, increased awareness of how untalented women are and, in extreme cases, a splotchy rash on one’s taint.
Valtrex Cobra: It’s Saturday night in the snake house, except for one Cobra who is plagued with unsightly cold sores, until a knowledgeable herpetologist gets him on Valtrex and he can be confident socially again. In fact, he’s so popular he realizes that he’s become a hypocrite as he condemns a young lady cobra as a ‘dick magnet’ because she had the same affliction. He realizes his only honorable course is suicide and so, after writing a sincere letter of apology, dislocates his jaw and gradually swallows a toaster. (I can kinda see why this one wasn’t picked up, it’s a downer, I was watching a lot of French stuff at the time, you know how they are.)
Adderall Panda: What’s wrong with Shmu-shmu? I’ll tell you; some terminal brat has been flicking ADD meds into his conclave. He barely touched his bamboo drenched in anchovy oil but look at him, he’s cleaning the walls with a toothbrush. What’s a zoo-keeper to do? Ride that wave, baby! Your bosses are happy, people are coming to watch this compulsive panda build a pagoda out of Popsicle sticks and you are awash in cash. But it can’t be healthy for him. To save his life and get ahead on a little housework, the zookeeper kidnaps him, but the panda breaks back into the zoo, hoping for that kid with the little yellow go-buttons. What unfolds is mental game of ‘who is actually the prisoner’, the panda whose every conniving motion is watched, or the man who hasn’t slept in two weeks because whenever he turns his back, that damn panda has a new burst of miscellaneous energy.
Haloperidol Tiger: Tigers are notoriously violent, but what if, in India’s largest game preserve, some puckish warden injects them with a common anti-psychotic used mainly in E.R.s to calm the schizos before they hurt somebody. The tigers just sorta lay around, huffing, eventually people get a little too comfortable and start throwing them food, then sneaking past the fences to take selfies, then trying to ride them, oh it’s all good fun until the haloperidol wears off and sixteen Danish tourists end up as a heap of bloody confetti. The film is a court procedural wherein the warden testifies as to the why, where and to what effect of the drug injections. I really swung for the bleachers on this one and think it’s my finest statement on homelessness and the horrors of PTSD.
MDMA Python: A group of deep-jungle exploring cheerleaders are beset upon by legions of murderous pythons, except these pythons found a derelict shipment of Ecstasy and, my friends, they are a-rollin’. Instead of wrapping the scantily clad ladies in their monstrous coils and squeezing them until they suffocate, these horny constrictors just want to ‘smell their vibe’ by grabbing them, holding them tightly, then releasing just a little, then squeezing again, then releasing just a little…their diamond shaped heads floating around hers, all fluid, eyes dilated like two black jelly beans, creepy tongue slithering lazily. It doesn’t take long for the girls to realize what’s actually going down. They’re being dry-humped to death! What follows is an adventure out of the jungle, while constantly having to scrape a mysterious slime off their bodies. A tale of female empowerment.
These works of brilliance lay ignored in Hollywood’s slush pile for years.
…and those sonsofbitches make Cocaine Bear!
Cocaine Bear?!
I’m glad, at least, Devon panned it
It even sounds stupid!
[pacing, rubbing temples] No, Bart. Arson is never the answer. Dr. Gottlieb made that very clear. Say your affirmation…say it. “Fire cannot quench my disappointment.” Say it again. “Fire cannot quench my disappointment.” And the others. “Fire will not teach them they are stupid.” Go on, “Fire is not the holy element of truth, to be unleashed by me against lesser, stupider people.” There’s more, fire is not…? “Fire is not the harbinger of my ascendance, nor is it the trumpet of my coming.” Aaaand?…
Aaaaand?….
Bart? Aaaaand?…..
…I forgot the last one.
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