Cru Jones Society

Greetings everyone, CJS co-founder and former regular contributor Limon here, substituting for Dagger, who is on a beach somewhere enjoying some well deserved time with his new bride, Lady E and away from the fray of work, cold weather, and CJS. I’ll be filling in here and there for the next week or so along with Hart to help keep CJS trucking along in Dagger’s absence.

Like many of Dagger and Lady E’s family and friends, I made the trek from afar to be a part of their wedding. Like Hart, I had issues with my tux thanks to Men’s Wearhouse. They somehow managed to send my tux to the wrong branch located on the opposite side of Tucson from the one I had arrived at promptly at 10:00 A.M. Which, unfortunately was about two hours before I was scheduled to be on an airplane. Fortunately I managed to navigate construction and agonizingly congested midday traffic, squeezed on the plane with seconds to spare and avoided missing the rehearsal and following festivities by an uncomfortably close margin. I won’t get into excruciating detail, but the goatee wearing douche at the first Men’s Wearhouse, was completely unapologetic and didn’t bother to offer any solutions to the problem they created. Nor did he make any attempts to speed the process along. I had a thing or two to say to him, but I had to drive from one end of a million people strong city to the other, try on a tux and catch a plane in less than two hours, so I could do nothing but grab my receipt and run out the door knowing this one would be a photo finish.

When I finally arrived to the Men’s Wearhouse that actually had my tux, aside from the fact that she decided to take a phone call after I tried everything on, leaving me to repack everything in the garment bag by myself, the lady who took care of me at the second store did well enough, and recognized without me having to say anything, that I was in some kind of massive hurry and didn’t have time to mess around.

Thanks to the massive cluster in Tucson, aside from the fact that everything in my tux fit generally well, I didn’t have time to fine tune the entire affair. It wasn’t until hours before the wedding that I would appreciate the half-assed 5 second measuring job that had been performed months before. My pants were about half an inch too long, my jacket just a hair too roomy, my collar half an inch too big around and the shirt probably an inch too short at the wrists leaving a super classy bare-wristed look every time I stretched out my arms. Fortunately my shoes and vest fit fine. All in all my tux fit like I had scrounged the individual parts off the rack at a thrift store. Fortunately Dagger’s choice in the actual tuxedo was about as far as you can get from thrift store fare, and I ill fit aside, the Tux was pretty damn nice.

After the wedding I elected to spend a few days in town enjoying beer and catching up with friends and family that I don’t get to see as much as I would like. I reaffirmed my lifelong love of terrible movies Monday evening in the ideal environment as I sat around with a few good friends enjoying a few marginal beers watching the pure cinematic trainwreck known as Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) as it mercilessly streamed into my friend’s television via Netflix. Lured by the prospect of an epic battle between a fearsome gigantic shark, and an eight legged abomination even more fearsome than the Kraken of Norse mythology, my friends were already knee deep in one of the most MST3K worthy piles of excrement created in recent memory.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus stars washed up actor Lorenzo Lamas, and washed up pop star Debbie Gibson along with some other people who most likely would prefer to remain nameless. The movie centers around a prehistoric shark and octopus frozen in battle against one another for eons in a glacier at the north pole. The pair is shaken free in modern times when a pod of whales somehow confused and distraught by global warming decide to commit suicide by repeatedly swimming headlong into the polar ice shelf causing a catastrophic collapse of polar ice and releasing the Shark and octopus from their icy prison to terrorize San Francisco and Tokyo respectively. Yes, the two creatures promised by the movie’s very title to engage in epic battle spend 99% of the movie on opposite sides of the globe. In a laughably bad cat and mouse game with the American and Japanese Naval fleets being led by an irrationally angry, evil and contentious Lorenzo Lamas.

Had I been forced to watch this movie alone, let alone forked over actual money, I would have felt violated by the experience. But in this setting, with half a dozen friends ever ready with a witty barb, the movie could have not been more entertaining. I’m guessing the movie’s producers gambled away most of the movie’s original budget over a wild weekend in Vegas, and as a result the special effects had all the professionalism and panache of something created by a high school student using an iMac. The short cuts when we were actually privileged to see the mega shark were reused to the point of hilarity, and the fabled octopus was a near no show until the wet fart of a battle between the Shark and octopus in the last 5 minutes of the movie. The action sequences were never longer than 30 seconds and rarely had any context. The movie would simply cut away from the storyline, to a scene of the shark eating something metal. The best of which involved an airliner cruising at an altitude of near 30,000′ that is eaten by the mega shark in one scale defying chomp as it somehow leaps several miles into the air and eats the airplane, not four seconds after some poor chump exclaims without provocation to anyone in the general vicinity that he is to be married in two days’ time. They didn’t have time to mention it, but I’m sure the pilot was two weeks away from retirement too.

The balance of the movie is comprised of equal parts stock footage of naval vessels, and painfully forced dialogue that is so laughably bad both in how it is written, and how it is delivered, it truly defies explanation. The sets looked like they were largely stolen from a WWII movie made sometime in the 1960s, leaving the actors who appeared to have been required to bring their own wardrobes to the set, about half a dozen U-Shaped backdrops that resembled something like a cross between an original episode of lost in space, and a modern laundromat a poor backdrop to attempt reading some of the laziest, melodramatic, incomprehensible, and pointless dialogue ever given a green light.

So, there we sat circled around the television making sarcastic comments, and debating the final outcome of which would win in an epic struggle between a mega shark and giant octopus, given what we know about the two species, and the evidence gained through watching the movie. The split was relatively close to 50/50, with me choosing the octopus, reasoning that its superior intelligence, razor sharp beak and feisty disposition would overwhelm the more simplistic, although admittedly superior physical prowess of the mega shark. Finally, After combining several flavors of Kool-Aid in various test tubes, graduated cylinders, and even an Erlenmeyer flask or two, The movie protagonists devise a pheromone that can be used to attract the two creatures to one another to lure them into battle to the death. A plan hatched after Debbie Gibson, the brilliant but rogue Marine Biologist, and her Asian counterpart, the Japanese scientist with a Chinese accent make sweet sweet love in the lab after a late night of some pretty serious sciencing.

I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the ending since I know so many CJS fans are avid bad movie lovers themselves, but suffice it to say, that when mega shark and giant octopus collide, nobody feels like a winner.

So, as my week in Denver draws to a close, I’m reminded of the good times in College, the time spent in between all all the craziness, the time between the best stories that we still get together and laugh about, the time spent sitting around with good friends and cheap beer watching whatever happened to be on the TV and simply entertaining each other because there was nothing better to do. I’m also reminded of how quickly time marches on, as many of my good friends, are married, some with families of their own, and life is so much more complicated than it used to be. Somehow we all know it just isn’t worth trying to go back again even if things were so much easier back then.