BINK-u…BINK-u…BINK-u…BINK-u… Which is, as near as I can figure it, a phonetic representation of the start of 24, with its relentlessly ticking digital clock*. We missed the show first time through, largely because of Fox’s incessant advertising of it during the 2001 World Series. We watched every pitch, since the Arizona Diamondbacks were playing, but this resulted in a steadily-increasing aversion to all the hype. After all, what was the last decent thing Kiefer Sutherland was in? The Lost Boys? [Ok, we might give him Dark City.]

It thus passed us by, but the second season drew us in, and hooked us completely, becoming the most-anticipated show on television. It was no surprise to find the DVDs of the first series in my stocking in Christmas morning, though if we were being honest, I think it was as much for Chris as me – hey, turnabout’s fair play, I bought her Brotherhood of the Wolf! What was a shock was how fast we got through it, especially given the nine months it took to get through the similarly-sized second season of Buffy. We started at 2pm December 29th; by 11pm on the 31st, we’d gone through all 24 episodes, some 19 hours of TV in less than 2 1/2 days.

The gimmick is, of course, that the show takes place in real time. 24 episodes = 1 day, each representing an hour. If someone takes ten minutes to drive from one location to another, that’s how long they take. Fortunately, there are multiple story threads, which save us from lengthy sequences of Kiefer Sutherland picking his nose in traffic. Central to the story is a plot to assassinate Democratic Presidential nominee David Palmer. At first, this seems straightforward – he is the first black candidate for the office – but as things unravel, it becomes clear that there is a lot more going on. People in his entourage are working against him, and his wife is not prepared to let anything stand in the way of her becoming the First Lady.

Leading the hunt is Jack Bauer (Sutherland), agent of CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) who is equally unwilling to let anything – least of all department protocol – stop him from finding the perpetrators. This is made pretty clear early on, when he shoots his boss with a tranquilizer dart and blackmails him in order to extract information. It also becomes apparent that someone inside CTU is not totally loyal either. Oh, and Jack’s wife and daughter have been kidnapped, to coerce him into assisting the assassination. Are we having fun yet?

It’s weird watching season one, only after seeing a good chunk of season two. In some ways, it does weaken the show, because you know who returns, which removes the sense of threat. But in others, it heightens the tension, providing a sense of futility to the struggles of characters who you know are going to die. We now know who is the mole inside CTU – so, in season one, every time the hero interacts with the traitor, we urge him to pull his gun and pump an entire magazine into the treacherous scum.

Mind you, some things are refreshingly similar. His daugher is still an irritating and stupid bimbo – the sooner she gets reunited with her mother, the better – and Palmer’s wife remains about as trustworthy as a king cobra with a hangover. The greatest joy of the DVDs is that you don’t need to wait a week for the next one, which was a huge relief, because it is genuinely hard to turn off. We inevitably found ourselves watching “just one more episode”, and returning to season two with 167 hours between installments was an immensely painful experience.

The scripting is great, despite an obviously contrived nature – each episode brings several mini-climaxes, building towards a finale of apocalyptic intensity (it’s remarkable how many exciting events happen at 58 minutes past the hour…). Our favourite was probably the end of #23, where the mole is revealed, yanking the carpet out from under you in truly spectacular fashion. We can only imagine how that felt on the first screening.

If there’s a flaw, it’s in the villains’ plans to assassinate Palmer, which are hideously over-convoluted, and more befitting a Bond villain. They have plants working in the power station where the first attempt is made, but rely on Jack to smuggle in a weapon when the security is at its tightest. Their ability to tap into any CCTV system at short notice is remarkable, and they possess so much technology as to suggest assistance from the Rowell aliens. They can infiltrate federal buildings and personnel. One would imagine they could find less complex methods, that are more likely to succeed.

However, the pace is so breathless that such concerns seem trivial, and the acting also helps paper over the cracks too. Special mentions go to Susan Clarke, as the cool, ultra-efficient Nina (who is even better in series 2), Dennis Haysbert as David Palmer (surely heading for a write-in Presidential campaign next year!) and Carlos Bernard as Tony (loyal to a fault, despite his previous differences with Jack). They lend critical support to Sutherland, and help make the show infinitely watchable.

It makes us wonder why there aren’t more films done in similar style – the last one to run minute-for-minute was Nick of Time, an obvious inspiration for 24, with its kidnapped child and omniscient villain. It’s probably a logistical nightmare – imagine the continuity problems of making sure everyone looks exactly the same throughout the months of shooting. But still, suspect we might well now see a slew of them in the wake of this show’s success.

But they’ll be hard pushed to deliver the same amount of excitement and intensity as the first season of 24, right up to the final scene. If the second series can manage to finish on such a high note – well, it was high, unless you were the major character whose cold corpse was discovered therein – we’ll be more than happy.

[* Chris just made it her “You’ve got mail” sound; freakily, guess how many messages she had in her mailbox when she tested it out? Yep – 24…]

Final entry in the TC log for 2002, and what a marvellously…palindromic year it was, particularly on February 20th. It is, however, another 20th – July – that sticks in my mind, as I made the final step in transition from lone wolf, confirmed bachelor and anti-social animal in general to… [shock! horror!] a family man.

How things have changed. I stumbled across an earlier editorial recently, dating back to the earliest dawn of prehistory – all the way back to 1998, to be precise, in which I wrote: “The prospect of marrying someone…seems highly strange…and as for the prospect of kids, I’m firmly with Amanda Donohoe in Lair of the White Worm on THAT topic.” But here I am, married, with children. And odder still, the happiest I’ve ever been.

I will admit that the marriage itself is something of an irrelevance, in that neither it, nor anything else, could make me more loyal, faithful or in love with Chris than I am anyway. However, the immigration people do not hand out green cards on the basis of “undying adoration” – though given the current backlog, I’m not scheduled to get mine until 2005 anyway. And marriage has a nice ring of permanence to it, even if I still look at envelopes addressed to “Mr and Mrs. McLennan” and want to forward them to my mother and father.

I’ve even settled into the parenting thing with less trouble than I thought. All you have to remember is that children are just like little adults – except with no grasp of logic or sarcasm. This isn’t quite true in Robert’s case, since he is already towering six inches above both Chris and I, and has already reached Advanced Irony, if not quite perhaps sarcasm. He turned 18 on Friday, so the next time he leaves the house, we will be changing the locks. 🙂

Maybe we should also lock Emily in – she is now 15, and every time we don’t let her get some part of her body pierced, Chris is convinced she hates us. As a relatively late arrival on the scene, without the first 13 years of maternal bonding, I am less concerned, and feel sure we could trade Emily in for a more reliable model on Ebay. Together, my cynicism and Chris’s motherly instincts combine, and I like to think we strike a reasonable middle-ground as parents. Mind you, Fred and Rosemary West probably thought so too…

And so we look forward to 2003, with a great deal of optimism, and much relief that there is no ominous, wedding-shaped cloud, looming on the horizon. Though an upcoming trip to Vegas may provide an opportunity for a quickie, possibly involving an Elvis impersonator. Our business is going well, despite the best efforts of Bank of America to drive us into bankruptcy – a long, nasty story involving them holding back $27,000 of our sales for two weeks – and if 2002 was the best year of my life, I see absolutely no reason why 2003 shouldn’t be even better.

I hope the same can be said for everyone reading this too. Here’s to a merry Christmas, a peaceful New Year, and may 2003 bring you as much happiness as 2002 has brought me.

7 o’clock in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, the phone rang. Chris struggled to consciousness to answer it, for whoever was calling at that time on a holiday clearly had a crucial message to convey, right? Wrong. “BEEP…..BEEP…..” The offending creature was a fax, tarnishing even this sacred festival (well, sacred to the consumption of far too much honey-baked ham, anyway) with random efforts to deliver junk advertisements for T-shirts, financial advice, or even, in a masterpiece of recursiveness, the faxing of junk advertisements.

I think that was probably the straw for me. I’m now prepared to stand up and say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Junk phone calls, junk faxes, junk emails – life is too short to deal with them all. I think the problem is probably worse here in the States, then it was back in Britain, because here, local phone calls are free. The spammers can thus spend all day dialling numbers, without having to pay a cent.

It makes me wonder whether there might be a justification for that occasional hoax email which claims that some governmental body or other is going to tax email. If they were having to pay even 1/10 cent per email, a lot of the spammers would be loath to blitz millions of addresses as they do. Of course, there are problems with this, not least collection, given the fly-by-night nature and foreign location of a lot of them. And then, there are the legitimate mailing lists, which you actually want to get mail from, which would be crippled by such a fee.

One alternative approach is to go after the spammers aggressively. Chris Gore of Film Threat took that approach, after someone hacked their mailing list, tracking down the home info and other details of the people responsible and publishing it all on their site. This did seem to have some effect – we faxed the spammers a polite request to stop their anti-social activities, and gratifyingly, got back our fax next morning with “FUCK YOU” scrawled across it. Gore is now filing a lawsuit against them. More power to his elbow, even if it’s probably entirely futile.

If you can afford the time, perhaps the most plausible approach – and certainly the most entertaining – is that taken by the War on Spam website, who basically yank the chains of the spammers, attempting to waste as much of their time as they waste of ours. The entire process is documented, and the transcripts published on the site; it’s immensely pleasing to read the results. Probably wisely, those involved operate largely under pseudonyms such as “Jason Hardknob”, since there is nothing more dangerous than a pissed-off Nigerian, trying to fleece you out of tens of thousands of dollars, who has just realised that he has been screwed with. No praise is high enough for those who take on these dangerous jobs, which border on a divine mission.

Unfortunately, while undeniably amusing, it too is perhaps all Canute-like, for the odds are that the volume of spam will increase in the future. There will always be idiots out there who want to increase their penis size, see Hot Barnyard Action, or simply MAKE MONEY FAST!!!! At least it’ll hopefully keep them busy, and out of the way of the rest of us.

I’d like to talk to you today about narwhals. These animals are proof, if any were needed, that whatever consciousness is in charge of things, possesses a wicked sense of humour and a fondness for real ale. For narwhals are the sort of animal that would only make sense after a long session down the pub – “lishen, Gabriel, let’s take a whale…and…and…lishen…let’s STICK A GIANT CORKSCREW ON ITS HEAD!” [Sound of a deity falling off a barstool] Between the narwhal, the sawfish and the hammerhead shark, I suspect God spent lunchtime of the fifth day down Home Depot, and that somewhere in the depths of the Pacific Oceans lurks a fish inspired by a Black & Decker Workmate.

Not only did the narwhal start off in life with an evolutionary disadvantage – though I suppose any predator would likely be too busy sniggering to chase them – they also don’t get the kind of press other members of the whale family do. You don’t find members of Greenpeace defending them in inflatable boats, though this is because rubber dinghies and animals with sharp, pointy noses are probably a bad combination. Nor do they get movies made about them – imagine how much better Free Willy would have been with a narwhal instead of a killer whale. He could have skewered the irritating child actor during his leap to freedom, and swam off into the sunset with a kid shish-kebab.

Here at Trash City, Chris and I feel such a creature deserves recognition, and so we did what we usually do in such cases – typed ‘Narwhal’ into Ebay’s search engine to see what comes up. We were impressed with the Huge Rare Antique Ivory Narwhal Tusk Nice!!!, which went for a cool $4,250. We particularly liked the photo of it lounging on the seller’s couch. Now that’s what I call a conversation piece – albeit in the “Will you please move that thing off the couch so we can sit down?” kind of way. Note the use of the word “antique”, to prevent the seller from being firebombed by animal-rights activists, rather than “newly hacked off and still bleeding from the stump”. We also found the Whale Narwhal Toy Rubber Replica 11″ Rare Toy appealing – even tossed our hats in the ring on that one, but lost out to a bidder named whaleshome1. Clearly a cetacean fetishist, if ever we saw one.

So, for the moment, we remain in a state of rubber narwhallessness. It’s an intriguing idea though, and we wonder if somewhere in a back room at Sanrio lurks the discarded concept of Hello Narwhal, with huge eyes but no blowhole. We yearn for someone to set up an Adopt a Narwhal scheme, whereby you get quarterly letters from the aquatic mammal of your choice, detailing life north of the Arctic Circle. We enliven tedious moments by sticking a straw to our forehead and doing narwhal impressions. Next week, it’ll quite possibly be sea-otters, but just for the moment, we’re in a narwhal state of mind…

Dir: Emmett Alston
Star: Sho Kosugi, Brent Huff, Blackie Dammett, Vijay Amritraj

Vijay Amritraj. Good tennis player. Top Asian for 14 years, reached the Wimbledon doubles semis with his brother. But an actor? That he has a supporting role here tells you something. That he doesn’t stand out as particularly awful tells you more about this semi-Bond wannabe, that wavers between jaw-dropping incompetence and incoherence. We know we’re in trouble from the opening credits, featuring Kosugi (a low-rent Sonny Chiba at the best of times) doing kata surrounded by leotarded ladies, in a bizarre yet chaste 007 ripoff. It even has a strikingly crap song, strangely comparable to All Time High.

Set in the Phillipines (another reason for bad movie fans to sit up), it starts with a busload of tourists being kidnapped by terrorists, having missed subtle warning signs such as a man in dark glasses by the road-side muttering into a walkie-talkie with a three-foot antenna. Mind you, given the stultifyingly banal tour guide, I’d be grateful for the diversion: once the native dancers appear, capture by sadistic goons would seem a welcome alternative. This is especially so, when the leader of the gang is named – and we rewound the film to check this – Colonel Honey Hump. She is a lesbian, naturally, though one for whom English does not appear to be a familiar tongue, going by her performance.

She is, however, a model of restraint and understated acting, compared to her boss, Alby the Cruel. He is German (why he is in the Philippines is never made clear), in a wheelchair, and has a monkey with a diaper in lieu of the traditional white Persian. Played by the wonderfully-named Blackie Dammett – let’s just say that again: Blackie Dammett (in real life, the father of Red Hot Chilli Pepper Anthony Kiedis!) – he has kidnapped the group in order to force the release of Arab terrorist Rahji the Butcher, a character whose dialogue consists almost exclusively of “BWAH-HAH-HAH…”

To rescue the hostages, the government call in the DART team, a threesome led by Spike Shinobi (Kosugi), although not until he has a flashback on a sun-lounger (why does he take his samurai sword with him poolside?) during which we learn he was expelled from Ninja Academy for letting his emotions get the better of him. You may be excused for thinking this is an Important Plot Point. Don’t bother: it is never referred to again. Chief sidekick, Steve Gordon, is played by Brent Huff – with his roles here and in Gwendoline, he is the first man to have starred in multiple Incredibly Bad Films, alongside actresses Sybil Danning and Yukari Oshima. [Michelle Bauer has managed three, but two were minor roles]

Our heroic trio end up in a museum, where they are attacked by midgets. It’s sentences like that one, which keep me going through all the long, dark dull movies, y’know. Despite having all his dialogue dubbed, Kosugi looks suitably flummoxed by this. Well he might, as a fall of perhaps a yard, tops, kills the guy they’re after, even though he lands on his feet. They don’t make villains like they used to. “That was his last jump,” adds Shinobi cryptically.

Despite the presence of an international hostage crists, the good guys take time out for a few drinks, and seduction in Gordon’s case. But Alby and his henchmen have turned the Phillipine jungle into a Bavarian drinking hall too, so they’re not exactly losing ground. The government, however, is left with no option but to release Rahji. Who, in keeping with fundamentalist terrorist tradition, heads straight for the nearest whorehouse, pausing only to exchange his car for a horse and buggy.

Tracking the manic laughter, Shinobi follows Rahji, clings to the escape ‘copter, throws him from it, visits a floating brothel, leaps overboard, is chased by scuba divers (clearly always on standby) and finds the terrorists. Thus passes the middle 1/3. We know we are heading towards the final, climactic, all-out assault but get two classic lines first: “It would take a tougher man than you to pull apart industrial epoxy” and, “Do you understand? PIG HEADSSSS!” from Colonel Hump.

The end battle has an almost Zen-like approach. Witness the following sequence:

• Medium shot of waterfall
• Sound-effect of shuriken flying through air
• Close-up of guy holding shuriken unconvincingly to eye
• Medium shot of waterfall.

This is cinematic genius on a par with Welles or Lean – the midgets earlier suggest Alston may be a pseudonym for Fellini. I note that “Alston” has not apparently worked on anything since Fellini died…By now, we are deep into “Eh?” territory, with Shinobi fighting evil ninjas for no readily apparent reason – between Germans, Japanese, Arabs and the locals, it is truly a terrorist United Nations. Rahji is dispatched with a detonator in the mouth, while Alby is trampled to death by a herd of stampeding polo ponies. At the risk of repeating myself, sentences like that sum up the reasons we lurk in the “under $10” section of less-discerning movie outlets: an unfettered imagination is a good thing, and when it goes utterly berserk, it’s even better. One can only wonder at the script meeting where they came up with this ending for the villain.

In keeping with traditional badmovie ethics, the title is meaningless, as far as I can tell, since at no point in the film do nine ninjas die. The German title translates as Nine Lives of the Ninja, which might make more sense. But what else would you expect from a film where Shane and Kane Kosugi play characters called Shane and Kane, while Vijay Amritraj plays one called…yep, you guessed it, Vijay. There’s one extraordinary appropriate line from the film that sums up the whole surreal experience: “Too many drugs this time, boys, too many drugs.” For the makers, perhaps – for Chris and I, not even a 151-proof rum-soaked pineapple proved sufficient to mask all of this film’s delicious flaws.