FSF, April-May 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  The fascinating thing about The Dead Outside is that as I watched, I realized this was truly the first zombie film to explore in depth the way women might survive such a catastrophe (the first I can recall at any rate). Women in this type of film usually are relegated to support roles for the men who do the actual dog work of survival, or else they acquire a distinct machismo and become gun-toting, death-dealing babes. While April does her fair share of death dealing, potting the odd zombie with her rifle and leaving them clinging to the fence around the farmhouse, her behavior is unmistakably that of an awkward, sheltered young woman. Older and more sophisticated, Kate uses wiles to achieve her aims, but they're directed toward the same deadly result. The conflict between the two women and the cracks that begin to show in Daniel's exterior, making us aware that all is not right with him, form the context of the film as it plays out to a disturbing finish.

  The Dead Outside (a double meaning seems embodied in that title) is not without its flaws. The filmmakers learned on the job and thus the narrative gets a little unclear toward the end, and their lack of financial resources becomes evident now and again; yet the strength of the picture lies in the fact that they let the narrative deploy naturally, without overmuch exposition, and use imagery and acting to illuminate certain plot points, and so a slight lack of clarity is forgivable, especially the first time out. TDO is an excellent example of what can be achieved with talent, a little money, and a lot of determination. I spoke to the filmmakers in Trieste and they told me they intend to shoot another movie this year, a science fiction flick. Once they start getting proper financing, I expect Mullaney and Bird will create movies that virtually everyone will want to see.

  At the opposite end of the spectrum lies Terra Nova, one of the most expensive films yet produced by the Russian film industry, a first class production all the way and a clear rip-off of films like 1994's No Escape, a Lance Henriksen/Ray Liotta (wasting his Goodfellas cachet) vehicle that explored what might happen if hardcore convicts were dumped on a remote island and left to fend for themselves. Barbarism, cannibalism, and various other unnatural acts abound. In No Escape, the Father (Henriksen) is the leader of a small yet resourceful group of cons who resist the debasing Law of the Jungle bunch ruled by the evil Walter Marek (Stuart Wilson) and seek to carve out a peaceful society. In Terra Nova, Ivan Zhilin (Konstantin Lavronenko), a man who is reputed to have killed twenty-two people, and a psychotic sidekick strike out on their own and form a peaceful society of their own, a kind of Robinson Crusoe and Friday relationship. This darkly comic relationship and the way the Chechen-Russian rift is detailed in miniature are the only points of interest in the film. The acting is strong, but the ending of the picture, a mash-up of Flight of the Phoenix and several B movies, is beyond absurd. Just goes to show what can be achieved with thirty or forty million euros, as if we needed the Russians to remind us of Hollywood's great lesson. If you've seen No Escape or any of the other convicts-dumped-on-islands (or desert fastnesses, space stations, et al), you'd do well to give this a pass ... unless, of course, you're attracted to the particularly nasty brand of post-Soviet brutality on view here.

  Of all the films I saw last week, none was more intriguing than Joseph Losey's 1963 picture, The Damned (American title, These Are the Damned). Best known for his Harold Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and the Kafkaesque Mr. Klein starring Alain Delon, Losey was an American director who worked mostly in the UK, and The Damned, an early Hammer film, was one of several ventures he made into the genre. The movie creaks a bit, showing its age especially in its evocation of Teddy Boys, a gang of thugs led by the young Oliver Reed who're first seen listening to a rock and roll song that features at one point the lyrics: “...black leather, black leather, kill, kill, kill,” a song so infantile in its nihilism that Losey saw fit to repeat it throughout the picture. They also perform faux-military drills in the town square, shouting things such as “Last one to the Unicorn's a cube!,” an utterance that would likely get them slaughtered by any real criminals who happened past. But once the gangbanging, Clockwork Orange-presaging, little bit of the old ultraviolence is done with, the story is chilling in the extreme. An American tourist named Wells (Macdonald Carey) and his sister flee from Reed's bunch and encounter a group of children who are held captive by the military in rooms at the bottom of a cliff and have never seen another human being. Mistaking Wells and his sister for their parents, the children hide them from the cameras that monitor them. The Americans are grateful, but don't realize that the children are mutants capable of surviving in a radioactive environment and can spread radiation with a simple touch. The Damned would be an excellent addition to a bill also featuring John Wyndham's Children of the Damned (we'll exclude Village of the Damned on the grounds that it incorporates Kirstie Alley in pre-Weight Watchers mode playing a scientist, surely one of the most unfortunate casting choices ever) if it were on DVD. Here's hoping this oversight is soon corrected.

  That's it for this time, kids, other than to say, Trieste was sunny and blustery, grappa with lemon juice is good for you, and steer clear of any darkened doorway from which issues the chant, “...black leather, black leather, rock, rock, rock..."

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  Short Stories: Stratosphere by Henry Garfield

  Henry Garfield works by day as a writer and editor for Bangor Metro magazine and says that in spite of being the great-great-grandson of an assassinated President, his Secret Service protection expired generations ago. His F&SF debut is a baseball story for readers of all ages. According to www.hwgarfield.com, this year marks the forty-second anniversary of the season that made him a fan of the Boston Red Sox and inspired his werewolf novel, Tartabull's Throw. BoSox fans should also take note that he has another baseball story slated to appear in Final Fenway Fiction later this year.

  My kids don't entirely believe me when I tell them I was there, on the field, the day it happened.

  In truth, they're skeptical about the whole legend. I could easily prove it to them. The ball's still up there, after all. The scopes at Farside Observatory have no trouble picking it up, especially within a day or two of the terminator, when the ground is in darkness and the ball pops over the horizon in full sunlight. Tourists used to ask about it, I'm told, but not so much anymore. It's yesterday's news. It's a long trip to Farside. And those astronomers have more important things to do.

  Some people still don't believe the ball went into orbit. Joe “Stratosphere” Stromboni got tired of being asked about it. An American player on a mostly Japanese team in a league run, like everything else up here, by the Chinese, Stromboni had a hard time getting along. He never learned to speak either language. He hated being interviewed. It got to where baseball wasn't fun for him anymore. He only had a couple decent years after he hit the homer. It's a shame what happened to him, really.

  Understand that these were the early days. Only a few of the mining settlements had teams. Most of the players were Chinese, as you'd expect. I'm half-Japanese half-Korean, but I was born up here, as was nearly every other player in the league. Most of the ones who weren't had come up as kids. Not Stromboni. Not “Stratosphere.” He grew up in the logging farms of northern Minnesota—the old iron range country that had spawned another home-run hitter, Roger Maris, in an earlier century. Stromboni could hit, too. He was a terror in high school, which is where he got his nickname, belting balls so far into the deep midwestern sky that observers said they penetrated the stratosphere. Had his brush with the American bigs, too, long after the big money was over. Got called up in September by the San Diego Padres and hit twelve home runs before the month was out. He hit eight more the next April before pitchers figured out he couldn't do a thing with breaking stuff.

  He was eleven years on from that brief but glorious September in San Diego and seven years out of organized ball when he showed up here. He was vague on how he'd escaped. We saw a few renegade Yanks from time to time even back then, but they all seemed to be looking
over their shoulders. Not Stromboni. Not Joe.

  The ladies loved him. He was a physical specimen, chiseled from that hard granite of the North American continent, and every bit as dense. I had to explain to him more than once why he wouldn't see any curveballs. “It's a vacuum, you idiot,” I told him. “There's no resistance.” He just sat there with that goofy grin on his face, the one the girls went ga-ga over. And he was helping us win ballgames. That's all that mattered. For the first time since we'd started playing ball up here, a non-Chinese team had a serious shot at winning the championship. The whole Kyoto Valley was excited about it.

  Were there six teams in the league that year, or seven? I can't remember. I played short and batted second, because I was the best bunter on the team. Stromboni could only have been a first baseman. He was a good foot taller than the rest of us. And he could smoke the ball. Used to drive our manager nuts. Couldn't get it through his head that those half-kilometer fly balls were just long outs.

  It's funny how we use the metric system for everything except baseball. It's the one legacy the Yanks left us from their glory days. That and the old Apollo sites. Took the kids out to see one of them, finally. Typical American waste. They beat everybody up here by fifty years, and then they threw out their trash and went home. First guy out the door couldn't even get the words to his speech right. No wonder their empire fell.

  But inertia is inertia everywhere in the universe, you know. The human body hasn't changed (although I can't imagine anyone playing ball in those voluminous twentieth-century spacesuits). On a ground ball in the hole, a fast runner is still out by half a step. Ninety feet between bases. Sixty feet six inches from the pitching rubber to home plate. Worlds may vary and civilizations rise and fall, but a baseball diamond is forever.

  Stromboni set a rookie record for home runs that year. I think he had nine. Now, that may seem like an unheard-of number, but you have to remember that this was before they deadened the ball. He had this big uppercut swing, and he could hit the ball farther than anyone I've ever seen. He didn't know our game at all. Didn't know about the farfielders and their big magnetic gloves. He didn't know they stayed out there the whole game, playing for both teams and never coming to bat, nine designated fielders to cover everything between the outfielders and the crater wall, and that it took a prodigious poke to put one out of their reach. But he kept trying. He didn't even know that once the ball was caught by a farfielder the play was over. I guess he'd never watched one of our games before coming up here. I mean, every kid over the age of five knows the Farfield Fly Rule. Not Stromboni.

  It's not that he didn't care. He wanted to win, just like everybody else. But he was stuck back in the Babe Ruth era of baseball. He didn't understand that we played the game as it had originally been intended: with well-placed ground balls, bunts, steals, and sacrifices. The boring old American game of pitching and power didn't work up here—not when a fastball was just a fastball and any idiot with decent hand-eye coordination could hit one halfway to the horizon. A few of the less sophisticated fans still ooh and aah when one clears the far wall, and Stromboni had his followers, too. But the long ball is stupid strategy and stultifying spectator sport. If all I wanted was to see how far someone could hit a ball, I'd watch golf.

  But like I said, those were the early days, and low-gravity baseball was still new. We were workers first, there to build roads and power plants, to extract energy and minerals and the very air we breathed from the guts of this New World. We worked hard, we drank hard, and we played baseball inside the rims of small craters, beginning in the twilight of the two-week-long day, and then on into the night beneath lights in one small arc of the circle, with the netted gloves of the farfielders glowing like fireflies in the distance. Our season ran the year around, two weeks on and two weeks off, with a two-month hiatus centered around the Chinese New Year. The championship series was played, then as now, in early December.

  Stromboni was on the crew building the refueling station out at Kilometer 108 on the road to New Shanghai. I saw him at work a couple of times, when I was laying tile in one of the new rooms. He was over in another section, going after a piece of wall with the jackhammer. He had those big arms. From taking down trees in North America, I guess. That's how he could hit the way he did.

  But he never got his head all the way around the idea that small ball is what wins games up here. What makes our game special is the acrobatic play of the infielders, the spectacular leaps to snare high bounces off the raked regolith, the dives for balls hit up the middle, the lightning-fast relays to cut down a runner trying to score from second on a single. How boring it would be if every batter simply tried to hit the ball as far as he could.

  Sure, there were a few home runs, mostly near the end of one-sided ballgames, and during practice it was fun to see how far you could hit one out into the vast sepia landscape. On the first day of the season, Stromboni hit a couple of BP pitches clean out of the crater and was instantly infatuated. One ball was found four kilometers away. In the game, however, all he produced were four arcing drives that soared momentarily against the black sky before disappearing into the flash of a farfielder's glove.

  The skip worked with him to cut down his swing and hit line drives. “Just meet the ball,” he said. “See it and meet it. There's no movement on the pitches in this league. You can learn to direct the ball. It's a much more effective way to play in low gravity."

  Stratosphere learned, because he was a good hitter, and he began finding the gaps, hitting behind base runners, and depositing soft liners over the leaps of the infielders. But his heart was the home run. In late April, he came up to bat with two outs and nobody on in the ninth of a tie game against Tycho, with whom we were then tied for first place. We'd blown like a six-run lead, it was late, and nobody was looking forward to playing extra innings. Stratosphere belted one over everything to win the game. Maybe it was the worst thing that could've happened to him—winning a game with his first home run—but we were all mighty happy about it. We mobbed him at the plate.

  I say it might have been the worst thing to happen to him, because that was when he started reverting to his old habits. Funny thing was, it never seemed to hurt the team. He'd kill a rally with a long fly ball one inning and deliver a bases-clearing double down the line the next. His home runs always seemed to come when we needed a run or two in a hurry. He couldn't hit it out with any consistency—nobody could, even back then—but his shots traveled farther than anybody else's. And he began to attract some notice on the Net. It helped that he was playing on a winning team. By late September we had first place sewed up. Only New Shanghai stayed close to us. They'd won three years in a row, and when December rolled around, no one was surprised that they were our opponent in the Series.

  Baseball is a team game. Everybody looks more or less the same in a pressure suit. But Stratosphere was the closest thing we had to a celebrity. He was visibly bigger than the rest of the players, and when he stood in the batter's box with the bat cocked high behind his ear, there was no mistaking him for anybody else.

  He didn't homer in any of the first six games of the Series. The New Shanghai pitchers approached him with caution, avoiding the inside half of the plate. He came through with a clutch base hit in the fourth game, when we were on the verge of falling behind three games to one, but most of our offense was carried by the players around him in the lineup. That's just the way of the game up here. We don't have stars; we have batting orders constructed for maximum efficiency in which no individual stands out. Ted Williams may have been the greatest hitter who ever lived, but how many World Series did he win? We've taken that lesson to heart.

  The seventh game was in our ballpark because we'd had the best regular-season record. It was the first time in years the Series had gone seven, and everyone tuned in to see if we could derail the New Shanghai dynasty. All eyes were on Stromboni.

  He must have been nervous, because he made an error in the second that led to three runs.
With a lead, the New Shanghai pitcher was extra careful, walking Stromboni the first two times he came to the plate. We cashed him in once on a sacrifice, but they managed to hold onto that three-run lead all the way into the ninth. Stromboni was due up third, and they brought in their closer, a hard-throwing kid named Chan who wasn't afraid of anyone.

  No one had a better view of Stratosphere's home run swing than I did, for I was on second base, right behind the pitcher. I'd gotten there by lining a solid single and then taking off on the next pitch to stay out of the double play, as the guy behind me grounded weakly to first. We needed one more base runner to bring the tying run to the plate.

  Stromboni had to realize they weren't going to walk him again, and the embarrassment of the error was still fresh in his mind. Chan got a strike at the knees, then missed low with the next two pitches. You could see Stromboni was mad, even behind his faceplate. They hadn't given him anything to hit all day. Chan's next offering came in belt high, over the heart of the plate. There was nothing hurried about Stromboni's swing—the old uppercut that he'd learned in Minnesota and spent so much time trying to correct up here—but he put all his considerable strength behind it. The ball rose into the black sky at a forty-five degree angle until it was too small to see. None of the farfielders even moved.