Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #4 – “Dark Moon Rising (Part 4)”

* Part 4 of 6 of the Batman and the Mad Monk limited series *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #4 – “Dark Moon Rising (Part 4)”! In the previous installment, Julie Madison happens to get within earshot of Dala at a bar and invites her to visit Niccolai to help with her very broken, very sad, very very rich father. He sucks on her neck a little, but he’ll keep her alive to try to make bank on the Madison fortune first.

But uh-oh, Bruce Wayne sees the comically large bite marks on Julie’s neck and now knows where to bust heads next! Yeehaw, son! Let’s keep this train moving!

Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #4 [January, 2007]
Written by: Matt Wagner
“Dark Moon Rising (Part 4)”

Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #4

A man is screaming from inside an iron maiden torture device. Niccolai is gettin’ horny just hearing his screams. Apparently, this man has been accused of snitchin’. He keeps screaming while Niccolai addresses his Brotherhood with words like “y’all gotta be careful not to fucking snitch on the Brotherhood”. “Encased here is one who let himself be captured and questioned by those who would unveil us!” Niccolai points an accusing finger.

Dala opens the iron maiden, revealing a very hole-filled person. Holes bleeding all over, spikes dripping red. He’s moaning and groaning. Dala licks her lips at the sultry torture of her beloved iron maiden. “The maiden’s embrace is ultimately fatal, but punctures are shallow so as to prolong the victim’s agony.”

The bleeding man falls to the floor, begging for mercy. He didn’t mean to get captured and questioned! He was lured by the promise of Beefaroni!

Niccolai brings out the wolves. Dinner time, and raw human flesh is on the menu! Giddyup!

“Such will be the fate of any who betray the bonds of our brotherhood,” Niccolai continues. “The night, you will find, is an unforgiving mistress.”

Meanwhile, Bruce lounges in his chair going over some facts in his peanut brain: there’s a vampire on the loose! Bluh!

“If I am to combat such a menace, I will need extraordinary weaponry. Garlic and religious icons seem to be mainly defensive measures.” Maybe you should watch all seven seasons of Buffy to prepare for your battle, Bruce ol’ buddy. It’s always a good time to watch Buffy!

Alfred chastises Bruce for stealing all the candlesticks from the dining room, but Bruce doesn’t care. He needed pure silver to make silver batarangs to defeat the vampires with even though vampires aren’t real. Get it now, Alfred? Go make me a steak.

Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #4

Pull some fillings out of your rotten teeth next time. And I would’ve made a giant silver dildo to beat them over the head with.

Julie wakes up groggy in her 19th-century four poster bed. She just experienced a sleep so deep that she’s surprised that she even woke up from it. The phone rings. Hungover, Julie picks it up and hears Niccolai’s sultry voice on the other end. “I’m calling to summon you to another of our… sessions. You understand? You will return to the castle. You will leave as soon as you are able.”

And Julie’s response? She drunkenly accepts. Stumbling downstairs, she puts on her shoes and jacket and leaves the house while, of course, Batman lurks in a shadow in the next room. It’s weird, though. Julie never gets told what to do by anyone. She’s always like “fuck you, fucker”, so why is this man she met once luring her so successfully? Hmmm…

“It’s after 3am,” Batman thinks. “Where could she possibly be headed?” He smartly decides to start trailing the addled woman unsafely driving the car. You know, vampires are able to exercise full control over their victims. Interesting that she’s not dead yet, though. Usually it’s all corpses with giant, gnawed-out holes in their necks! Julie’s neck doesn’t seem entirely gnawed-out… yet…

Norman Madison peers out the window completely frightened. “He knows my name. And, as I feared… he knows where I live!” Dude, no one cares about you. Get out of my comic.

Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #4

Just a case of SIDS! Whew!

Jim Gordon has a bad dream about trying to stop a rival cop named Jensen from killing his family. Jensen is a bad guy who hates Gordon for being a good guy. Gordon wakes up in a cold sweat and retires to his study for a calming smoke. Shit’s been stressful to say the least! Wubba lubba dub dub!

Dala has a whole monologue about how she met Niccolai. It’s overwhelmingly uninteresting, so I’ll spare you the specifics, but she kind of wants to fuck him and he’s taking her as a trusty assistant. Dala welcomes Julie as she arrives at the castle. Batman’s already outside the place glaring intimidatingly. He thought this castle had been long abandoned! Now there are vampire squatters? This is bullshit!

The castle used to be owned by the Rallstone family, who were even richer than the Wayne family! Of course, it was all shady Trump-style dealings. Bootlegging, slave trafficking, all that fun wholesome stuff. “What dark secrets do its stone walls contain?” he says as he makes his way around the labyrinthian tunnels under the castle.

Oh damn, there’s some wolves down here.

Batman throws a few smoke bombs down to the floor and the wolves leap through it like they were air bombs! That’s ok, because Batman cold cocks these wolves instead and it works. He ties up one’s legs successfully, but the other bites him savagely on the leg. Batman decks the wolf in the face a few times, but the wolf will not let go. Jaws are thoroughly sunk in, and it’s tetanus time for The Bat!

So Batman shoots him with mace and that works.

Batman and the Mad Monk, Issue #4

Rape!

Funnily enough, Batman accidentally maces himself! Caught slightly off-guard, the wolf lunges at Batman again… but Batman retains composure. He grabs the fucking wolf and swings him against the wall repeatedly until he breaks its spine. One quick visit from the ASPCA later, and Batman’s on his way!

After spending 185 minutes getting the bleeding leg under control, he feels woozy from the mace. Julie’s life is in danger, man! There’s no time for this fooling around! Move it!

Deep inside the castle, Niccolai is chewing on Julie’s neck when Dala interrupts him. The wolves have been howling for hours, making a racket. Go do something about it. Niccolai, always one to care for the wolves, goes to figure out the wolf situation.

Niccolai is like “we’ll finish this up later, but please try and remember your father’s account numbers and password and his social security number” before fucking off to check on the wolves. She hazily agrees to do so.

Batman marvels at the workmanship of the dank and musty stone walls as he traverses the corridors. Suddenly, like a booby trap in a shitty cartoon, the steps he’s descending retract and turn into a super fun happy slide à la Bart Simpson. Batman slides into a dungeon! And the dungeon walls start closing in on him! And the dungeon walls have spikes on them! And there’s no way out!

Final Thoughts

Tropes galore in this issue! Hopefully no one kills Jim Gordon’s kid and, oh yeah, Batman gets saved or something. I don’t really care either way. I’m getting lunch.


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The Death Knight’s Squire, Chapter 1 – Milhouse the Scholar

Dungeons & Dragons is the world’s most famous tabletop role-playing game. There are elves and dice and dungeon masters who wear capes. I’m embarrassed for even playing this.

Disclaimer: I’m learning as I go. There is a 100% chance that I’ll fuck up, not take something seriously enough, and piss you off to no end. Get over it.

Our Hero!

Welcome to Dungeons & Dragons! I am your host Tom the 37-year-old man-boy, and you will now read thousands upon thousands of words wherein I describe myself fumbling through pre-written Dungeons & Dragons adventures until I give up out of desperation. Today’s adventure that will assuredly take me 78 blog posts to get through is The Death Knight’s Squire, a solo D&D adventure (which means being completely friendless is the whole point!) No dungeon masters, no groups of three or more people. I can sit in the dark in my kitchen at 11:30pm and bang this out by myself. Sounds exciting!

I am prompted to create a Level 2 character. I shall call him Milhouse the Scholar, which already dips well into creative license with the Milhouse Van Houten character because Milhouse is pretty dumb. Not Milhouse the Scholar! He likes reading books!

I decide that Milhouse the Scholar will be an elf. Not just any elf, a high elf. This doesn’t mean that he’s on drugs, but I think it means that he’s arrogant and haughty and thinks he’s better than everyone. Elves are pretty smart, though, and if I’m going to have a scholar on my hands I’m going to need something smarter than an oafish dwarf. I also decide that Milhouse the Scholar will be a wizard, because wizards are smart and they wear pointy blue hats with stars and moons on them. And I most certainly cannot wait to try to memorize 500 spells, confusing rules regarding spell slots and spell memorization. Milhouse the Scholar is 5’0″, weighs 95 pounds, and is nimble and intelligent. As such, I dump more points into Dexterity and Intelligence and I don’t bother with pesky attributes like Strength or Wisdom. I’m not here to be wise. I’m here to be an annoying know-it-all who charges headfirst into demon-filled dungeons while screaming my head off.

A quick search of “chaotic good” comes up with this. Yikes!

Milhouse is Chaotic Good, as many elves are. This tells me that he uses his conscience to make decisions instead of pesky social norms like laws and rules. Basically, he’s stubborn as shit. But that’s ok, because Milhouse’s heart is in the right place and not only does his moral compass point north like a good boy, but he would never do anything to harm anyone. Not anyone that didn’t deserve it, that is!

Milhouse prides himself on his ability to devour tomes and texts with a voracious appetite, so he compensates for his wet noodle arms by being shrewd and spry. However, Milhouse is so obsessed with scholarly pursuits that he is competitive to a fault. If he even catches a whiff of intellectual superiority from you, he will get sulky and resentful and may even try to prove that he’s better than you by rattling off the 900 ingredients in Dung Wort Juice. Here in the Forgotten Realms we call that “toxic masculinity”!

As an elf, Milhouse naturally comes from a village of elves. I’m not sure exactly where this village is in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s probably somewhere in the Elven Woods and has a name like Nyrkporp or Deschanel. I’m going to call it the village of Bryn Mawr, which is a street in Chicago that sounds pretty elven and fantastical. As a very tight-knit community, Milhouse values his friends and family above everything else (even his books!) and would do anything to protect them. Even if it means sacrificing himself. Even if it means going against his Chaotic Good alignment, which may be put to the test some day. Hmm…

Because Milhouse is a well-meaning young man with scruples, here are the following default behaviors that exist at the beginning of this adventure, but not set in stone. I’m not sure if any of this actually matters for an adventure explicitly written for soloing, but I need to flesh out this nerd’s personality anyway.:

–Milhouse is shy and will generally not use Intimidation (Charisma) or Deception (Charisma) to persuade someone.
–Milhouse is more proficient with ranged weapons and will use them whenever possible.
–Milhouse is thorough and will check every room in a dungeon for books and treasure.
–Milhouse will not initiate an attack unless it’s absolutely necessary.
–When fighting, Milhouse will not aim to kill a human opponent, but animals are fair game!
–Milhouse is careful and will not hurry in any situation unless in dire need.

That’s good enough for now! Milhouse the Scholar has been introduced and maybe I’ll actually start playing the game next time instead of rambling about elves.

See below for my painfully unfunny character sheet!

Click for Larger

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The Dragon Reborn (Book 3) – Chapter 3: “News from the Plain”

The Wheel of Time - Book 3 - The Dragon Reborn

Moiraine emerges from her hut looking slightly disheveled. Leya isn’t dead, much to Perrin’s relief, but she’s busted her head to the point of needing Moiraine’s Healing powers. Moiraine is skeptical that Rand’s mini earthquake was an accident, so she huffily returns to her hut. Not very poised these days, are you Miss Aes Sedai? Losing your cool, eh? Interesting. Interesting.

Min says she’ll hit Rand with a fucking spoon if he pulls that shit again. Perrin, knowing Min is depressed about all this, offers her to find some money and drop her back off at Baerlon. Min declines. Fate is a bitch.

Leya brought news from Almoth Plain. No one is fighting the Dragonsworn. It’s very strange. Lan and Uno think this is a trick. Moiraine says something unseen is killing tall men with gray eyes. These are called Soulless and it’s yet another goddamn creature that the Dark One uses for his personal Dark One errands. These bastards can sneak up on people and kill them without them ever knowing it happened, which sounds pretty nice actually. Not a bad way to die, never knowing that you died!

Moiraine says that shit’s starting to go down; everyone be cautious. Perrin returns to his own shitty, cold hut where he sleeps in a shitty, cold manner so that he doesn’t have any shitty cold dreams.

Methinks the whole next chapter is going to be a shitty cold dream.


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Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11 – “Rebecca, Please Come Home (Part 1)”

* Part 1 of 4 of the Rebecca, Please Come Home storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11 – “Rebecca, Please Come Homel (Part 1)”! And welcome to another fresh, steamy storyline from everyone’s favorite has-been superhero! In the previous storyline, Jessica Jones is hired to find a woman’s husband. The husband is Rick Jones, who used to be Bruce Banner’s buddy before he fucked him up and Hulkified him. Then he was with Captain America for a while. Then he sang David Bowie covers.

Jessica finds Rick Jones, but he’s some other guy pretending to be Rick Jones. A compulsive liar. That’s pretty much the whole story.

I hope this one’s better.

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11 [September, 2002]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Rebecca, Please Come Home (Part 1)”

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11

Jessica Jones is cruisin’ in her shitty sedan belting out the lyrics to “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City”. Just really screaming it. Lost in her own blissful exuberance…

…until she passes a giant billboard that simply says “REBECCA, PLEASE COME HOME. WE LOVE YOU.” in white block letters on a black background. That shuts her right up.

Jones drives into downtown with her quaint little map in her hands. She’s lost. Then she finds one of those newspaper vending machines that shows the following headline on today’s paper: “Investigator called in to find missing girl Rebecca Cross, case continues”. There’s a picture of Jessica Jones’ mug right on the front page. “Mother fuck!” she yells to herself.

A nearby cop, recognizing Jones as the wretch on the front page of the newspaper, asks her if she needs directions to the Cross household. The David Cross household, that is! Comedy! The cop looks like fuckin’ Luke Wilson, I kid you not. Luke Wilson asks Jones to stop by and see him again before she leaves town. He smiles like a fucking pig cop bastard. Jones returns the smile. “Think it’s best we work together,” says Luke Wilson with a wry grin. Jones agrees.

Yeah, work together in Bone Town.

At Casa de la Cross, Jones introduces herself to Rebecca’s aunt Katherine and then holds the newspaper up to her face. Katherine beams, but Jones is like “I’m supposed to be your private investigator, bitch! Private!”

While explaining the inner workings of pointed topics like “the killer can hide the body”, Rebecca’s mother descends the staircase.

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11

But my success rate is 0%.

Jessica Jones begins the uncomfortable interview. The last time Rebecca’s mother saw her was about a month ago. She left to play Bingo at the church and didn’t realize that her daughter was gone the next morning. She thought she went to school, and when the school called and said that Rebecca hella didn’t go to school, Rebecca’s thus-far unnamed mother was like “oh gee golly”.

Now, this lady, she doesn’t live with her husband anymore. Not even on speaking terms. Jones asks if he might have something to do with this, and Ms. Cross just rants about how much her good-for-nothing husband sucks ass with his fat face. She just had a feeling that he was constantly leering at 16-year-old Rebecca with her boobs and butt and other parts that girls have. Just some of that ol’ Alabama father/daugther dynamic.

Of course, Rebecca never said anything about it. Probably because she and Rebecca weren’t very close anyway… heh heh, uh… anyway, Rebecca’s been a real cold bitch at school to her teachers even though she gets straight A’s and is friends with all the chess nerds with orthodontic headgear.

Jones grabs a most recent photograph of Rebecca: hair dyed gray and purple-tinted glasses. Black lipstick. She looks 45.

“Nothing like this has ever happened in this town, has it?” Jones asks.

“No,” responds Katherine.

Cool. Well, Jones is going to have to have a nice chat with Mr. Cross. And then… of course… the hunky police-looking guy. And then the school. But first, cough up some dough. I know money might be tight, but if you look in your couch cushions you may be able to scrounge up some–

“I have 75,000 dollars in bonds,” says Ms. Cross. “Find my daughter.”

Yes, ma’am! Off to see Daddy Dearest first!

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11

Off to a great start!

Mr. Cross sits all fat in his easy chair watching Maury or something. “She really gone and did it,” he mutters. “She fucking called a private eye to pin this shit on me.”

Yes, sir! Cuff ‘im, boys.

Jones introduces herself politely, to which Mr. Cross responds with a hearty “She tell you I fucked the kid?” Jones doesn’t take the bait. The jailbait, that is.

After a couple more tries for a civil conversation, Mr. Cross hefts his bulk up out of the chair. “You know what? I don’t think I’m going to help you help my wife put me in jail for nothin’. No. Don’t think so. I didn’t kill my daughter. I didn’t fuck my daughter. I didn’t even think about fucking my daughter.”

Methinks the sir doth protest too much, but then he gets sappy. He is proud of his daughter. He is proud that she grew up smarter than him. That she could go be better than her parents. Do something useful with her life. And she was going to… but someone kidnapped and fucked her, maybe! And now Ms. Cross wants to pin the blame on Fat Degenerate Dad. Well, no mas!

“Fuck you for coming here,” he says. “Fuck you for thinkin’ you can intimidate me – like I got anything left to lose.” Then he stops for a second. “But you go ahead. The house is yours. You go through everything. You go through this entire town. Just find what happened to my girl.”

Yes, sir! Cuff ‘im, boys.

Mr. Cross leaves the house. Jones starts snooping around for, like, leads and clues and shit. Like a real detective. She enters Rebecca’s room which looks cluttered, just how she left it I presume. Jones finds a charming ankh necklace! Case closed!

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11

Hey there, Gorgeous. Do you want to go step on some unarmed black guy’s neck with me?

Jones then finds a diary, which she makes a bug-eyed face at. After looking under the mattress and finding a box with a couple of coins and some weed in it, the Luke Wilson cop shows up at the door looking sly and sexy. Like a fuckin’ fox. “Find anything?” he asks. Fuck this guy.

“Where she keeps her pot,” Jones smiles.

“Want to split it?” asks Luke Wilson.

I don’t think they actually split it because that would be a CRIME in 2002. But they do get talking. He asks her why he didn’t come see him. She says she was going to, but then didn’t! But she would’ve, for serious. “Any chance you know who the local pot dealer is?” she asks him. He pretty much grunts at her. This guy sucks.

“It’s one of the senior students, but I’m not sure which one,” he finally responds. She rifles through a pile of scrapbooks and asks the cop if she can borrow them. He allows it as long as she returns them. There could be some meaty clues in here, boy howdy. Like magazine clippings of Heath Ledger! Pre-corpse!

They both head outside, and the cop brings up an uncomfortable subject. “They say you got superpowers?” he nudges. She answers in the affirmative. He tells her to behave herself. Then he tells her to come see him again later. There’s some penis-in-vagina stuff that he wants to show her, of course! Wink!

Jones visits Rebecca’s high school but doesn’t speak to the principal. He’s fishing or dead or still on the phone or something. His secretary leads Jones to Rebecca’s locker, which is still chock full of bullshit that her parents didn’t bother to come collect. Jones asks her if she knows the clique that Rebecca runs with, but she doesn’t. Useless.

Rebecca has a picture of Daredevil taped to the inside of her locker door. I’m throwing up right now.

A woman, or perhaps a girl – the art sucks – sidles on beside Jones.

“You’re looking at the wrong side of the door,” she says.

“What?”

“What you’re looking for is on the front of the locker. See it?”

“No, what are–? Oh.”

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #11

The smoking gun!

“What is this?” Jones asks.

“What do you expect… she was a mutant.”

Oh snap.

Final Thoughts

That was a little rushed at the end there, wasn’t it? “DIE” is written on a girl’s locker and this mystery person is all like “what do you expect?”

Well, at least Rebecca’s dad seems cool. Wait.


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Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Tagline:
At Ridgemont High only the rules get busted!

Wide Release Date:
August 13, 1982

Directed by:
Amy Heckerling
Written by:
Cameron Crowe
Produced by:
Irving Azoff, Art Linson

Starring:
Sean Penn
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Judge Reinhold
Phoebe Cates
Brian Backer
Robert Romanus
Forest Whitaker
Ray Walston

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I loved this movie as a teenager because 1) it’s hilarious, and 2) there’s some real rude-ass titties in it. Sean Penn plays my favorite high school character of all time, edging out Ferris Bueller by just a small margin. Looking forward to seeing it again, I probably haven’t watched it in almost 20 years.

THE 600(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Welcome to Ridgemont High, where the Fast Times never slow down! A crazy cast of characters awaits! Sean Penn is Jeff Spicoli, an unflappably good-natured surfer stoner. Jennifer Jason Leigh is Stacy Hamilton, a sexually inexperienced and curious 15-year-old. Phoebe Cates plays Stacy’s friend Linda Barrett, a self-proclaimed sexually experienced wingwoman. Judge Reinhold is Brad Hamilton, Stacy’s older brother and hot shot at the local fast food joint. Brain Backer is “Rat” Ratner, all around nice guy with a crush on Stacy. Robert Romanus is Mike Damone, a real smooth-talking silver-tongued motherfucker who scalps concert tickets and helps Rat get the girl. Then, of course, Ray Walston is Mr. Hand, Spicoli’s strict and no-nonsense history teacher.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Yo Rat, lemme teach ya the ways of the human female anatomy. This here’s the dilnick.

The stories of the movie are loose and focus mainly on Stacy. She confides to Linda that she’s a virgin and has never had a boyfriend. She is goaded to (successfully) flirt with a 26-year-old customer at the pizza place that she and Linda work at (after confirming the man that, yes, she is indeed 19 years old good sir). She sneaks out of the house to go out on a date with him and he fucks the virginity out of her in a sleazy baseball field dugout. Later, Rat musters up enough courage to ask her out on a date, but forgets his wallet when they dine at a restaurant (which Damone helps him out with). When they return to Stacy’s house, she shows him a photo album, and they start kissing a little bit. When sex is on the table, Rat gets scared and runs out of the house, which Stacy misinterprets as disinterest. Soon, she starts fancying Damone and invites him over to swim in her family’s pool. He shows up and they both bone in the pool house. Damone ejaculates almost immediately and gets her pregnant. Stacy confronts him about this and asks for half the money for the abortion, which he ends up flaking out on when he can’t scrounge it up. She lies to Brad about meeting friends at a bowling alley, he gives her a ride and she sneaks off to the nearby clinic. He notices and waits to pick her up. He’s very nice about it. Stacy completes her big, fat coming-of-age adventure.

A few other characters get their B-stories. Brad gets fired from his job at the fast food restaurant and works at another fast food restaurant where they make him wear a pirate costume. In one of the most iconic scenes in film history, he fantasizes about Linda coming out of the pool, dropping her bikini, and kissing him. Linda catches him jerking off in the bathroom, the audience lols. Cool guy Damone spends much of the movie coaching Rat on how to seduce the woman of his dreams before he fucks her behind his back. Spicoli, of course, goes head-to-head against the unrelenting Mr. Hand and Spicoli is way out of his league. He does call Mr. Hand a dick after he rips up his school schedule card, so Spicoli is certainly capable of frustration! He has a bunch of pictures of naked women pinned to the walls of his bedroom.

That’s really it. In an epilogue, Rat starts dating Stacy but they haven’t had sex yet. Damone gets busted for scalping Ozzy Osbourne tickets. Brad becomes a manager at a convenience store. Linda goes to college in Riverside and moves in with her psychology professor. Spicoli saves Brooke Shields from drowning and blew the reward money hiring Van Halen to play at his birthday party. Mr. Hand thinks everyone is on dope.

The end.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Wanna see pictures of my abortion?

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — General Movie Thoughts

This movie is still great, but more so because I’m still able to watch it through the lens of a 16-year-old. As a MAN (loosely termed) in my mid-thirties in 2023, I take only few issues with it, which is incredible for an ’80s teen movie. Kudos.

Issues? Is it kosher to film nudity scenes for characters who are supposed to be underage? Is it kosher for me to even use the term “kosher”? Both Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates were 18/19 at the time of filming, portraying 15-year-olds, and both go topless. Leigh even goes nearly full-frontal. Is that cool? Am I even supposed to immensely enjoy Phoebe Cates pool scene? Because I did! And I’m not ashamed of it. I just wonder how often in the 21st century are adults, who are portraying kids, going all nude in a movie. Someone give me an example if you’re reading this.

You’re not reading this, who am I kidding?

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

♫♪♫ You Are a Pirate! ♫♪♫♪♫♪♫

Titties aside, there’s also the whole abortion sub-story that doesn’t get resolved in a very satisfying way, in my opinion, for Stacy. And this is no fault of the writing, because kids are shitheads and not everything gets a happy ending. Mike Damone fucks Stacy for about four seconds and jizzes her pregnant. She asks for him to pay for at least half the abortion, which he can’t do so he flakes out completely and leaves her hanging the day she goes to the clinic. Then Rat just has a fight about Damone fucking his crush, and that’s then end of Damone’s story (besides the whole working at 7-Eleven epilogue). At least make the guy save up the money and pay Stacy back! Come on, man, the guy jizzed her pregnant! Sorry, I just wanted to write that again.

Other than those two admittedly minor gripes, this movie kicks ass. A lot of the movie is shown from the female perspective, which was rare at the time for this type of movie, and treated it respectfully. It helped tremendously that the movie was directed by woman, giving it more of a female-sympathetic vibe. Stacy has a brother who cares about her, a friend who cares about her, and she has immature sex with two immature dudes without being painted as a slut. They treated the idea of abortion with dignity. She does get the “nice guy” at the end, but Rat is a genuinely nice guy not just out there looking for sex, so it’s cool with me.

Spicoli has got to be one of the greatest movie characters of all time. Instantly likeable, dumb and accidentally funny, kindhearted and worry-free. I looked forward to all of his scenes, and the inexplicable bagel in the pants gets me every time.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Who wants cream cheese??

Then there’s the charming Brad, played by a charming 26-year-old Judge Reinhold, a guy with the baritone voice of a 40-year-old man and couldn’t pass for a high school senior on a good day. Really nice to his sister, this guy. I work with a guy who looks just like him, outdated haircut and everything. I shall serve no fries before their time.

Have we all had a teacher like Mr. Hand? I love how he ruins Spicoli’s evening and not only does Spicoli accept it gracefully, but he actually learns something from it, too! Growth of character! This movie has everything!

TOPIC 2 — Phoebe Cates’ Boobs

Seriously, dude. *highfive*

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Wait, I was supposed to screengrab a second later! Oh well!

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Nicolas Cage lied about his age so that he could get a bigger part, but the producers eventually found out that he was only 17.
Jealous of the 18+ ladies flashing their breasts in the movie, Cage was adamant about showing his penis and balls in what would have been a landmark scene in the annals of Hollywood film history! Too bad.

Jennifer Jason Leigh’s father Vic Morrow died in a helicopter accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) about three weeks before the US release of “Fast Times.”
That guy got all sorts of decapitated by a helicopter, which is a crazy thing to happen during filming of a movie.

Sean Penn asked out Pamela Springsteen, who played Dina the cheerleader, on the set of the movie; she accepted.
Ugly-ass Sean Penn got to date Bruce Springsteen’s little sister? And then Madonna? And then Michael Keaton? What a lucky guy!

Sean Penn extinguished a cigarette in the palm of his hand in order to better understand his character Jeff Spicoli.
Sounds like a pointless act of machismo in order to “better understand” a two-dimensional stoner. But what do I know, I’m not an actor. I’m barely even a writer. I’m not even literate.

Ralph Macchio was asked for a role, but he demanded a salary the director couldn’t afford.
Man, fuck Ralph Macchio. I’ll kick his little Karate Kid ass.

Media site Kueez listed Phoebe Cates’ topless pool scene as one of the “Most Paused Movie Scenes In The History Of Hollywood”.
Back in the good old days before the Internet where 15-year-old kids had to rent a movie from Blockbuster in order to jerk off.

For his masturbation scene, Judge Reinhold brought a large dildo to work with, unbeknown to the rest of the cast. Phoebe Cates’ look of horror and disgust is very real.
He brought a large dildo “to work with”. That could mean anything! My imagination is running wild with this one…

…and I’m spent.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Who’s the big hairy pussy now, fellas? Yeah, ME, that’s right! *puffs out chest*

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Trying to take the nostalgia goggles off, I genuinely think this movie holds up. The themes of young romance, dickish teachers, part-time jobs, and navigating through high school social circles are timeless. Interestingly, too, is that no one is a complete weird asshole to anyone, which is very unusual in an ’80s high school comedy. That part isn’t relatable, but nothing’s perfect.


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