Thread: Gunny's law!

Warning: Strong Language!

GUNNY’S LAW!
by
Milton P. Smith

(Milton P. Smith served in the United States Marine Corps where he trained as a combat journalist. His manual “Breaking Hardasses the Easy Way” is required reading at Guantanamo Bay. He is now living in a DIY iron lung in the loft of a bungalow owned by two Gays in a seaside town in North Wales).

Attention on deck!

Some of you ladies out there probably think that Plan 9 From Outer Space was the worst SF movie ever made. Am I right? Well, the Gunny has found one that makes Ed Wood’s movie look like a fucking masterpiece. This particular crock of shit is based on Alex Raymond’s comic strip hero, Flash Gordon. Yeah, I know what you maggots are thinking. But that’s a negative. This is not...I repeat, not, the 1980 movie by that cocksucker Hodges. Jesus, that was bad enough. I’m talking about the original series that ran in the 1930’s. Here’s how it happened. A few weeks ago one of the faggots I’m staying with – a self styled middle-class, part-time anarchist, called Guy Forkes, bought a DVD at a car boot sale and thought I might like to watch it. (I got a DVD player and a Samsung 23” flatscreen Plasma HD ready TV mounted on my iron lung. We invalids need a few luxuries, right?)

Anyway, this DVD had four episodes of *Flash Gordon – Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe. Reading the opening credits I figured these guys must be real hardasses. They must be grunts. They must be marines. Fuck trying to conquer a planet or a solar system. These jarheads were going after the Big One. That’s until I watched the goddam thing. Jesus H. Christ! The Big Green Killing Machine often goes into combat with inferior equipment...but not this inferior. “Special effects?” From what I could see the studio budget must have just about run into double figures. Let’s start with the spaceships. Imagine cutting off a guy’s dick and sticking some fins on the end. Then stick a matchstick in the hole the former owner used to piss through. You maggots get the picture? That’s what these space ships look like. And when they fly, they make this humming noise like an electric generator. Along with the humming noise there’s the sound of bacon frying in the pan. And, to top it all, there’s smoke and sparks coming out of the fucking engine. They even got exhaust manifolds coming out of the side. So I’m figuring this little motherfucker is powered by a V8! And the guy who teaches people to fly these things gives out pieces of advice like, 'Okay, when you’re approaching Venus you really need to be in fourth gear.'

Not everyone had the same thought. Guy Forkes reckoned those things showed they got tumble driers in there! And a fucking dishwasher, right? Typical faggot! That’s a negative, dipshits. Forget internal combustion engines. Forget your Star Trek warp drive. Forget hyperdrives, jump drives and Infinite Improbability Drives. Forget your nuclear thermal engines and your Electromagnetic thrusters or ion drives. You can even forget Cavorite, (that’s the stuff those guys in H.G. Wells’ book used to get to the moon. It shielded the earth’s gravity and caused air to become weightless. So why the fuck didn’t they just fill it with helium? That’s lighter than air. I can just picture them talking in these squeaky voices. ‘Are we there yet?’ And when you think about it what propels the thing when it gets out into space? Because there’s no fucking air up there. Personally, I figure when Wells wrote that story he must have had a few too many Napoleon brandies after dinner).

No, forget any complex machinery. The spaceships in Flash Gordon are powered by one of those sparklers you get in fireworks. Next there’s the size of these things. I figure you can get about six normal adults in there or twelve fucking midgets. Any more than that and we’re talking sardine can. Remember Starship Troopers and those big ships packed with thousands of grunts? If you want to move a decent size army using Flash Gordon’s ships then you’re gonna need about a million of the motherfuckers. By the way, talking about Starship Troopers. The marines in my Beloved Corps are trained to fight hardcore enemy. The people they fight are as hard as Drill Instructors. They do not fight fucking insects. We can leave that to the army. Anyway, back to the ships. So what about the interior?

Let’s begin by getting one thing straight, ladies. We’re not talking USS fucking Enterprise. We are talking basic. How basic? Well, lets just say that Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Luis was more high tech than these shitbuckets! For example, to start one of these spaceships you just pull a big handle mounted on the wall. And – now get this - the mounting is riveted on! Yes, the whole fucking ship is constructed out of rivets. Imagine NASA using rivets on Challenger. How far would they get, huh? The fucking takeoff itself would probably shake every one of those motherfuckers loose. And, if by some miracle, it manages to get into orbit then there’s the problem of re-entry.

ASTRONAUT: Mayday! Mayday! Huston, this is Challenger. The fucking rivets are melting.

HUSTON: Tough shit, boys. Happy landing.

Let’s see...what else have they got? Well, these state of the art spaceships have a radio. But, unlike Lieutenant Uhura’s, this one is made of Bakelite. With knobs on. And it’s got valves inside. And, while the good ship USS Enterprise has long-range scanners, Flash Gordon’s has a fucking telescope mounted in the cockpit. There’s only one problem – it’s just on one side of the ship. The peckerhead who designed this thing must have thought what the fuck do we need two telescopes for? So if there’s a Borg cube approaching from the other side, tough shit. Finally there’s what looks like the handbrake on a Motel “T” Ford. That’s the lever that opens the door. Forget pushing a button. That’s for candyasses. These guys are grunts. They pull levers.

They’ve also got a simple form of matter transporter. Flash uses this to rescue a guy from another spaceship. (In this scene they’re flying through the atmosphere. Unlike we humans, the aliens Flash encounters use their spaceships for planetary and well as interplanetary travel. This is much cheaper than building two types of aircraft.) So what about this transporter? Don’t get a hardon. This gizmo doesn’t turn solid objects into particles and transports them along a high-energy beam. That’s far too fucking complicated for the people who designed these things. They prefer the old fashioned methods. So each spaceship is issued with a coil of fucking rope. And, after flying their spaceship over the top of the stricken one which is on fire, Flash orders Dale Arden to take over the controls.

You know, I really gotta hand it to Flash. This peckerhead has a lot more confidence in women than I have. Without any previous experience, Flash is asking her to fly an alien spaceship. Not only fly the fucking thing, but also match the speed of the stricken craft underneath. Zarkhov is with them and I imagine he told Dale that in the absence of a matter transporter they have to use some rope. But Dale has other things on her mind. Her biggest problem is she can’t see the other spaceship. The only scanning device on board is a telescope of the sort you can buy in a shop. And that points straight out of the side. So she’s gonna have to rely on female intuition. Like I said, Flash seems to have a lot of confidence in this female.

So, while Dale is praying she’s not screwing things up, Flash ties the rope to the bulkhead and lowers himself down. At this point some of you maggots are probably thinking that at least those Sea King rescue choppers have a fucking winch, right? Winches are for candyasses. This is Flash Gordon. Of course, if he were on earth Flash would have to battle the slipstream. But this is Ming’s planet, Mongo. On Mongo a guy can dangle out of a spaceship travelling at 800 mph and not even feel the wind in his fucking hair. Regardless of the laws of physics, Flash manages to open the hatch on the burning spaceship below. He then signals to Dr Zarkhov who unties the rope and throws it down to him. At this point Dale, using a form of blind fucking reckoning, brings her spaceship down below the other one so Flash can tie the rope round this guy and lower him down. At this point I can hear Mr Spock on the Enterprise.

SPOCK: I suggest we proceed with caution, Captain. These creatures have barely evolved.

So what about Ming the Merciless? Well, he’s got this super weapon called a Destructo Ray that looks like one of those circus cannons. Only Ming’s is silver. After all, this guy is an emperor. And it shoots this ball of fire that travels through space and once it hits a planet it sets fire to it. Of course, just one missile won’t do it. He needs to fire a lot of them. So he uses one missile as a warning. Give up or your planet is gonna be crispy fried. Pretty neat, huh? In Star Wars they had the Death Star. Just one beam and the whole planet blows up. Ming the Merciless likes to work slow. And to fire this thing he has these two big levers. Like the ones you see in a railway signal box. And, just like the signalman, he pushes one and pulls the other. Either that’s just a coincidence or someone is taking the piss. Talking about weapons, Ming’s men carry swords. I kid you not. These guys are dressed like soldiers out of The Man in the Iron Mask. Talk about hardcore. Ming intends to defeat the universe with cold steel.

But all is not lost. They do have ray guns. I can imagine Ming saying, ‘Only use the ray guns if the swords don’t work.’ This is no ordinary weapon. It looks like a cigar tube with a handle on top. For a start you gotta bend your arm before you can use it. If you shoot this fucker like a normal weapon you’re gonna blast your toes off. Okay, I got nothing against Gays. Like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, I consider recruits, pogues and every non-member of my Beloved Corps to be equally worthless. But I got a feeling that this ray gun has been made for a faggot. The other thing about this weapon is it doesn’t seem to have a trigger. So you can just imagine the Special Effects guy talking to the Producer...

SPECIAL EFFECTS GUY: ‘Okay, Mr McCrae. It’s almost finished. It just needs a trigger.

PRODUCER: Forget the fucking trigger. The budget does not extend to a trigger.

SPECIAL EFFECTS GUY: But Mr McCrae. The audience will notice that the ray gun doesn’t have a trigger.

PRODUCER: The audience will not notice, son. Because this series is intended to be shown in mental hospitals. And those fucking lunatics won’t know what a trigger is. And even if they did, they’ll be too heavily medicated to give a shit.

Finally, there’s Prince Barin from Aboria. One of Flash Gordon’s allies. Although Barin and his men fly around in spaceships, they dress up like Robin Hood and are armed with bows and arrows. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that, in their effort to conquer space travel, the Aborians used up all their technological ability. When Barin congratulated his chief scientist, the guy probably said, That’s it, Your Majesty. We are unable to invent anything else.

‘Very well,’ replies Barin. ‘In that case if we’re attacked we’ll just have to make do with what those English humans used at Agincourt.’

So, we got Ming the Merciless who is out to conquer the universe using a silver cannon that shoots balls of fire and supported by a bunch of guys armed with swords and ray guns that don’t have a trigger. And you got Flash Gordon trying to stop him with a bunch of guys who think they’re Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Sounds like they’re pretty evenly matched. Yeah, I figure Universal Studios who were responsible for this pile of happy horseshit probably did intend to show it to the inmates of America’s loony bins.

Semper fi, you assholes!

*The cheap little cocksucker only bought one DVD and that contains episodes 5 to 8. So 1 to 4 are missing. Not that it makes any difference!

Good fun!