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mst3kproject · 3 years

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Invasion of the Star Creatures

I promised you guys something truly awful this week, didn’t I? Well, how about a space invasion ‘comedy’ (big emphasis on the air quotes there) produced by Samuel Zarkoff to be a double-bill with The Brain that Wouldn’t Die? The closest thing it has to a star is Frankie Ray, whom MSTies might know as the writer of Laserblast. He also wrote Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, which I really, really need to see one of these days. Film Historian Bill Warren described Invasion of the Star Creatures as ‘so helplessly bad it’s almost unwatchable’. Let’s find out if he was right.

Fort Nicholson is the world’s center for atomic research, despite apparently being staffed entirely by idiots. The two biggest idiots are, unfortunately, our main characters. Their names are Philbrick and Penn. No, I don’t know which is which. No, I don’t care. I’m gonna call them Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice. The first ‘comedic’ sequence involves Rick With The Squeaky Voice sitting in a barrel pretending he’s going to space, and getting his ass set on fire.

That sets the tone for the whole movie quite nicely. It’s stupid and it’s not funny, and it never gets any better. In fact, as we shall see, it gets significantly worse.

For some reason, Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice are assigned to a mission to explore a cave recently exposed by a nuclear test. This turns out to be the base for two seven-foot space women, Tanga and Pona, and their tuberous minions, the Vege-Men, and the entire party is soon in their clutches. The aliens say that they have come to save humanity from destroying ourselves through nuclear war, but naturally the army isn’t into that. Rick With The Squeaky Voice discovers that kissing the women puts them into a daze, allowing the two idiots to escape, but of course nobody back at Fort Nicholson believes their story. Is it really up to these two to stop Tanga and Pona from heading back to their home planet with their report? We’re doomed.

I don’t remember which review it was, but I once invited you to imagine a movie in which every character is Dropo or Watney Smith. This is that movie. This is proud of being that movie. The aliens try to read the two Ricks’ minds and one is completely empty while the other is full of superhero fantasies. Pona calls what she sees ‘completely illogical and infantile’, which is a fair description of the whole movie.

There’s a sequence where one of the army men shoots a rattlesnake that was about to bite one of the Ricks, and then cries because ‘he might have had a family’. They try to lampoon the thing in old movies where the characters walk through the same set from different angles by doing it without cutting away or changing the camera angle, but it just looks dumb. The Colonel gives a long-winded speech about the merits of getting straight to the point. A forced march stops for a lovely picnic and wine tasting. A guy gets his ass kicked by a Vege-Man and declares, “that’s the first time a salad ever tossed me.” There’s a running ‘gag’ about fans of ‘Space Commander Connors’ recognizing each other’s secret decoder rings and immediately going into a full-on geek-out.

None of this is funny, much of it is downright embarrassing, and the worst part is that the writers have no idea how to include their attempts at comedy in the story. Rather than the hijinks advancing the plot, every time something that’s supposed to be funny happens, the whole thing comes to a dead halt. This gives the impression that the movie is stumbling around in the dark with no idea where it’s going. It finally seems to settle on a plot when we find out that the spaceship is about to leave and must be stopped. After some bullshit the Ricks convince the Colonel (and only the Colonel) to help them take on the aliens. At this point I was thinking that this movie was pretty terrible but it hadn’t actually pushed me to the point of being tempted to turn it off…

And then it got racist.

The last ten minutes or so of Invasion of the Star Creatures are a downward spiral in which it seems like they gave up trying to be funny in favour of being actively offensive. First, they encounter what’s supposed to be a group of Native Americans on horseback. Rick With The Squeaky Voice tries to get their attention by saying “hey, Kemosabe, I wanna buy some blankets!” The Natives don’t speak much English but they do a lot of grunting, and threaten to kill the Colonel because they think he’s General Custer (?!). Then they kidnap everybody and force them to smoke the peace pipe and drink firewater and the white guys only escape once the Natives have passed out.

Holy shit. Not only is this repulsive, it is, as previously noted, irrelevant. It has no effect on the plot other than to waste time. The Natives do not help them defeat the aliens and neither does the Colonel, who is also in a drunken stupor. And then, just when we think this can’t possibly get any worse, the defeated alien women declare that they must throw themselves on the mercy of the Earth Men. This turns out to mean marrying them, and the dialogue specifically likens marriage to slavery, which Tanga and Pona seem to consider a point in its favour! The end of this movie left my head spinning. It’s like I watched a guy get ‘comedically’ knocked over by a punching bag for forty-five minutes and then he suddenly turned around and punched me in the face.

(Hey, I just realized… remember how I said the cave was exposed by a nuclear test? The dialogue emphasizes how this whole area is irradiated and dangerous – and then totally forgets about it. It’s never mentioned again and the characters take off their protective gear and never put it back on. So… that was useless, too.)

There is stuff in this movie that could have been funny. The secret decoder ring stuff almost got a smile out of me once or twice, because the characters seemed so earnest in their love for ‘Space Commander Connors’ and his lore. The ‘Vege-Men’ also had potential. We get to see a greenhouse room where they’re grown to be the women’s slaves, and the seedlings are hands or feet sticking out of flowerpots with a few leaves around them. This is fairly amusing and I could see it being the juvenile form of a sentient plant on Star Trek TOS. Adult Vege-Men are actors in stupid carrot costumes that they obviously can’t see out of very well, which should have been funny just because it’s so terrible, but Invasion of the Star Creatures is so bad you can’t even laugh at it ironically.

The idea of using a bumbling idiot as your main character, let alone two bumbling idiots, frankly baffles me. Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice are supposed to be the guys we, the audience, identify with. We’re supposed to like and root for them and to perhaps be able to imagine ourselves in their places, but the only thing I feel for them is contempt. Why would anyone want to see themselves in these guys? Perhaps it’s an attempt to say that anybody can be a hero, but the two Ricks don’t even qualify as that. When they save the world, it’s basically by accident. The ending, which rewards them with promotions, medals, and beautiful wives from outer space, actively makes me angry because they didn’t earn any of that!

Invasion of the Star Creatures works very hard at being pointless, and there’s very little in it that comes anywhere near a theme. If any such thing exists, its in Tanga and Pona’s insistence that they’re here to save humanity whether we like it or not, and how the humans react to that idea. The women say it would be a shame to see a young civilization destroy itself because nations were too stupid to work together. Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice reject this entirely, which is supposed to be a joke: these guys are in the army, so if humanity transcends the need for conflict they’d be out of a job. The rest of the plot then seems at pain to emphasize that humans cannot work together, and do not want to.

After all, the two Ricks’ attempts to summon help come to nothing. The Native Americans never understand that these men want assistance, and the Colonel thinks it’s all a Space Commander Connors game before sliding under the metaphorical table, having never done anything useful. The Ricks themselves spent most of their time arguing and complaining and in the end succeed only through good luck on their part and poor timing on that of the invaders. Usually a story that begins with ‘aliens want to save primitive humans from ourselves’ would end with ‘the aliens were wrong about us’. Invasion of the Star Creatures seems to want to say the aliens were right the whole time!

So there you have it – Invasion of the Star Creatures. It started off kinda bad and not funny, then swirled down the cinematic toilet into outright offensive, racist, sexist drivel. I’m trying to think of some small thing I can say about it that’s nice, but I’m having a very hard time. I guess I kinda liked the rumbly noises that represent the alien language – that was more fun than just having the actresses spout random gobbledygook. Other than that, I’m at a loss. The actors suck, the sets suck, the effects suck, the costumes suck, and everybody involved was a bigoted dickweed. Fuck this movie.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #invasion of the star creatures #fuck this movie #60s

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

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Ask D'Mine: Afraid of the Flu Shot?

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/ask-dmine-afraid-of-the-flu-shot/

Ask D'Mine: Afraid of the Flu Shot?

Yep, we're sticking with our fear theme for the month of October. Who's afraid of a big bad flu shot? You might be surprised!

Only way to find out is to brave this edition of our weekly diabetes advice column, Ask D'Mine, hosted by veteran type 1, diabetes author and community educator Wil Dubois.

Need help navigating life with diabetes? Email us at [email protected]

Nancy from Pennsylvania, type 1, writes: I was wondering if any other PWD has had this happen to them. I was diagnosed with Type 1 five years ago at the age of 48. The first two years of my diabetic life I received an annual flu shot. However, 2 years ago I started wearing an insulin pump. I went for my annual flu shot and within two weeks of getting my shot, my basal rate increased two-fold. Not Happy! I discussed this with my endo and she really had no explanation for this increase. This basal increase was permanent. I haven't gotten a flu shot since and my basal hasn't increased. I've had a consistent A1C of 5.8-6.0 so it's not like I don't take care of myself. Afraid to get the Flu shot again...

Wil@Ask D'Mine answers: Yeah, I know: we talked about the flu shot here at Ask D'Mine just the other day. But this was so frickin' bizarre I just had to talk about it (no offense Nancy). First, I gotta say, I've never seen anything like this happen. I've never heard of anything like this happening. I even spent some time with my favorite search engine and couldn't find anyone else reporting anything like this. Well, there was this one guy, but he was also talking about his alien abduction experiences and his past life as Elvis, so I wasn't inclined to give his flu shot story much credence.

You, however, don't seem to be a kook, so we need to figure out what's up with your basal. Next, I fired off an email to an endo friend to ask her if she'd ever heard of anything like this happening before and her reply was "Nope. And cannot think of a mechanism that would cause it either."

So flu shot 101: A traditional flu shot is just a vial of dead flu. It's used to prime the body's immune system to recognize the live flu virus. The nose spray stuff is live flu, but it's had the crap kicked out of it first so that it's very weak. You can think of either one as training wheels on a kid's bike. You use the training wheels to learn how to ride. Once ya got it down, you take the wheels off and you're fine. Your body needs to use flu training wheels for about two weeks after the shot, then it can tackle real live flu viruses.

So for two weeks your body is developing its immune response. I could see, maybe, by some stretch of the imagination, that you might need a wee bit more insulin during that period. But a two-fold increase? Holy crap! And then one that stays around? Also deepening the mystery is the fact you'd had two annual flu shots previously with no ill effect (but of course every year it's a different strain). Also weird is the fact that the basal issue hit pretty much at the end of the immune response period, not at its onset.

You're not gonna like what I have to say next.

I think whatever caused your basal change had nothing at all to do with the flu shot. Issues of cause and effect can be really tricky. That's why it takes so many months to investigate plane crashes. A plane goes down in a storm. Did the storm cause it? Maybe. Or maybe the engine failed. Or the crew was drunk. Or the wing broke.

So bear with me for a moment. Assume, just for the sake of argument, that the flu shot wasn't the cause of your permanent two-fold jump in basal. What else could have caused it?

One thing that jumps to mind has to do with the unique kind of diabetes you have. You're an adult-onset type 1 like me. We're kind of an odd-ball set. (Note that this past week was an awareness campaign about this kind of diabetes, called LADA.) One of the more bizarre elements of adult onset is an extremely extended honeymoon phase. The honeymoon phase is like Custer's Last Stand at the Battle of the Little Langerhan. Picture the poor troops of the Beta Company surrounded by the circling bloodthirsty savages of the immune system, intent on great bodily harm. (Attention beloved Native American readers: no offense intended, just go with the flow of the analogy, OK?) The insulin-producing beta cells keep up the fight as long as they can, but ultimately, they are killed to the last man by the body's haywire immune system.

The honeymoon phase is actually a pain in the ass, as far as I'm concerned—both from clinical and personal experience. Some days the pancreas can squirt out some insulin. Other days it can't. Some days it squirts out quite a bit, other days not so much. It's like juggling feral cats. It's a blessing when the last troops fall because then all the insulin has to come from outside your body and, frankly, it's easier to control that way. Fewer variables.

In most younger type 1s, the honeymoon phase lasts a few months. Rarely more than six, but sometimes up to a full year. In adult onset folks, however, the honeymoon can run longer. A year and a half. Maybe two.

Three years seems a stretch, but that could be what happened to you. It could be that your body had some stable endogenous insulin production for several years, but the savage immune system finally broke the lines of the last standing beta cells and wiped them out. Did the flu shot have anything to do with it? Ummm.... Maybe? I mean the flu shot is designed to kick the immune system in the pants, after all. Did it stir up the natives, as it were? I don't know. This is probably where I'm supposed to say, "Damn it Jim, I'm a writer, not a doctor."

We should also look to your pump. How long had you been on the pump when this happened? It looks like you got it the same year you got the killer flu shot. Normally you'd use a lower total daily dose of basal on a pump than with shots, but your mileage may vary. Are you sure you had all the pump settings dialed in right? This generally takes some time.

I should also ask if you changed the style of infusion set on your pump. Oh, and did you...errr... you know... gain any weight? Any changes to other meds? I've got quite a long list in my office of meds that tend to f—[D&R1] , up blood sugar. Various psych meds, steroids, and hepatitis C meds tend to be the worst, but blood sugar can also be raised (requiring more basal) by dozens and dozens of meds for every malady under the sun, even including cholesterol-lowering drugs and some vitamins.

I can understand that you are not happy, but does it really make a difference how much insulin your pump pumps so long as your A1C is so awesome? (And I am very jealous, by the way.) And I can understand why you are afraid to get another flu shot. You have visions of another two-fold increase dancing in your head. I mean, if that actually happened every time you got a flu shot you'd need to get a super-sized pump in a couple of years!

So I validate your fear. Once burned, twice shy. I get it. I understand it. I don't believe your flu shot caused the basal issue, but there is no way to ever know for sure. Crazy unheard of things happen every day, right?

The flu shot is part and parcel of good diabetes therapy, but it's not like you're going to die without it. Well, you might. I mean, you could get flu, get pneumonia, and die. Happens to almost 50,000 people a year; but you could just as easily be run over by a FedEx truck while jaywalking.

I guess I wouldn't blame you for skipping the shot if that's the choice you've made.

This is not a medical advice column. We are PWDs freely and openly sharing the wisdom of our collected experiences — our been-there-done-that knowledge from the trenches. But we are not MDs, RNs, NPs, PAs, CDEs, or partridges in pear trees. Bottom line: we are only a small part of your total prescription. You still need the professional advice, treatment, and care of a licensed medical professional.

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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