Six: the Mediocrity Unleashed

It isn't often that people on opposite sides of an issue can agree on something: that is what makes the film "6: the Mark Unleashed" so special. My girlfriend is an arm waving tongue speaking Pentecostal; I am the precise polar opposite.

6: TMU is a film about the coming of the antichrist, the tribulation, and all that wonderful suffering that some Christians actually look forward to seeing. It's a definitely low budget, direct to DVD film. If they can avoid showing something, they have someone narrate the missing part of the story. If an expensive effect is required it happens off screen. We see a guy pulled from his car. In the next scene we see four charred tires. Oh! They must have burned his car. But that would cost money! So let's just show the four tires.

The plot: The leader has taken over. People are enjoying life in great hedonism. Chips are implanted in some, and they are controlled by satellite uplink. And Christianity is outlawed.

We hear huge chunks of narration at the beginning of the film. Think of the most overused, hackneyed way of presenting a dystopian society in a film.

We see someone narrating new implant recipients on their rights and responsibilities in society. A disembodied head, in fact. I can see the script conference: "That's been done 10,000 times." "Correction: 10,001," the script writer would reply with a smug grin.

There is one fellow who is spreading Christianity, so he must be killed. So they capture an ex cop turned smuggler and torture him until he agrees to kill the Leader.

Now, what is funny is this: the torturer is bald, dresses in dark clothes, and has huge dark circles under his eyes. Uncle Fester, you have lost weight! Looking good!

In prison, the ex cop mulls over his options. Now, keep in mind this is a prison run by the antichrist, who hates Christianity. The prisoners talk of Jesus constantly: on the walls are hand written Bible verses. The prisoners are allowed to have Bibles.

The prison cells look like dorm rooms with bunk beds. The prison halls and cafeteria look like a high school. There are hardly any guards.

The antichrist fellow seems a tad bit incompetent; hardly the sort one would fear.

My father made a comment about Hogan's Heroes some years ago. He commented that the security at his old army base was a lot more strict than Stalag 13. Come to think of it, the security at the prison in that film was about as secure as a dormitory.

At one point the prisoners are talking about how happy they are that they are going to die, so they'll be with Jesus. The guards are more than happy to comply with their wishes.

Here is where the action starts. The ex cop escapes and brings some confederates with him. The cops give chase in their cop cars. The prisoners elude them by pulling over to the side of the road; the cops drive by. Oh yeah, that's believable.

Rather than try to attack the Christian leader, the ex cop decides to destroy the satellite uplink to everyone's chips, freeing everyone's minds. But, as Gomer Pyle would say, "Soup rise, soup rise, soup rise!" The Leader himself comes in to stop him,

Think of the most stereotypical villain/hero confrontation ver. Think of a cliché that has been used so often that it shows up on comedy skits. Hold that thought in your mind.

The leader walks in, clapping his hands slowly. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

The cop starts shooting guards. And then the Christian leader comes in briefly before leaving.

We next see the ex cop about to do a forced Jayne Mansfield/Marie Antoinette. He is happy because he will see Jesus. We then see one of his companions, who escaped, resolving to continue the fight. The end.

About all I can say about the ending is that it was a win win situation for all involved: the cop wanted to die, and he got his wish. Uncle Fester got to torture some people, so he was happy. Whatever message in the movie was lost due to its incompetent filmmaking.

What is interesting is that the main female star, Amy Moon, bears a striking resemblance to Carrie Ann-Moss from the Matrix movies. No, this is beyond a resemblance: there is no way you could tell them apart if you saw them; even the hair styles are the same.

My girlfriend, meanwhile, picked up on a lot of my criticisms. She also said "This is not bow the tribulation is supposed to happen."

Isn't it great? Both sides agree: 6:TMU stinks.

Stalking the Wild Link

I have been putting it off for a few days, but finally I could put it off no longer: I had to update the LOST IN SPACE links page on my website. I was dreading the task, because Geocities shut down on October 26. There were a lot of good LOST IN SPACE websites on Geocities; websites that contributed a lot to LOST IN SPACE fandom. Sure, archive.org would have some of them on file, but I knew deep down that the loss would still be great for us fans.

Some months ago, long before the Geocities debacle, I had emailed all of the people who had Geocities websites, asking them to email me if they had planned on moving their websites o new servers. No one replied. I am sure that at least some of the Geocities websites I have listed as missing in action have been moved to new servers. Hopefully in the next few months they will show up in search engines.

I have never really gone over how I look for new LIS web pages. Google.com is a good starting point. I type in keywords and go from there. If I find a website, I go to my web page’s HTML, using a program called Front Page. As an example, if I find a LIS website with the URL “epicfail.com” I type that on the search function on Front Page. If it doesn’t come up, it’s an unlisted website and it gets inserted. As you can all guess, a lot of LIS websites I come across in my searches are already listed on my links page.

There are other search engines, and I have used them successfully from time to time, but Google is the #1 choice. Other sources include other LIS web pages, email from webmasters, and what can be called “other”—for instance, I found one website by looking up the Facebook listing of a friend.

Keywords are vital in searching. Obviously, “lost in space” is at the top of the list. To be really thorough, I also try other words: “Dr. Zachary Smith,” “Jupiter 2,” “space pod,” and so on. Sometimes I will get millions of listings. I couldn’t go through all of them in my lifetime, so I usually go in about 20 listing pages or so before moving on.

I remember one fan complaining that his website wasn’t listed on my links page. I reassured him that if it wasn’t listed, it’ because it didn’t how up on search engines. I then asked him to send me the URL, so that I could list it. He declined: I guess he was happier complaining than having me do something about it.

I decided to look up his website. The first one I found was a domain name. The domain name had expired. I looked it up I archive.org. Archive.org sometimes includes website photos, and sometimes they don’t. All I could see were a bunch of blank boxes with very little text; hardly anything the fans would care about. Oh well, a dead end.

I looked some more. Aha! That website was on Geocities. So I typed the URL in archive.org, and… nothing. They didn’t save that page. So, apparently it was my fault that I didn’t list a website that was no longer on the web. That makes perfect sense to me.

I wasted half a day looking for something that wasn’t there.

Another bugbear in listing websites is figuring out what category they fit under. One fan just did a sort of episode guide for continuing LIS beyond the third season. It was interesting in a minor sort of way. But how do you categorize that? I finally gave up and put it under “fan fiction.” In another case, a website did the standard putdowns of LIS: that it was silly, campy, and so on. But they did it in a humorous fashion. Should I have put it under the humor section, or the hate site section? I decided on hate site in the end.

The Geocities debacle was about what I had expected. Anyone watching me editing the LIS links page would have gotten quite a chuckle: every time I came across another Geocities website, which was quite frequent, I would let forth an oath that would wrinkle the wallpaper and knock down small birds sitting outside.

Looking over the websites out there is an interesting task. On new, unlisted websites I have to let them load long enough so that I can see what category they fit in. When that is ascertained, I get all the information I need and move on to the next website.

On sites that are already listed, I wait just long enough to see if the website is still there, and then move on. This usually means loading the page long enough to see the top title before moving on.

To complicate manners, I am on dialup, which means that websites sometimes take an awfully long time to load. I have found that some websites don’t load up on my machine at all; I have a second browser handy to check if the websites are really gone.

Beyond all of that, I am happy to report that LIS is still well represented on the web. Now if the fans could just hire a psychic who could tell us which servers will be around in 10 years and which ones won’t, we’ll be all set.