The Being

The Being (1983)

Dir. and written by Jackie Kong

Starring Bill Osco, Martin Landau, Marianne Gordon, José Ferrer, Dorothy Malone

Ah, finally, something genuinely exotic: a horror movie set in Idaho! That may not seem exotic to some, but I don’t know much about Idaho. This is partially my own ignorance, but I protest that I am not exclusively at fault here; the culture doesn’t provide a casual viewer of media with much information about Idaho. Certainly I have learned less about Idaho (a state which Wikipedia informs me is home to over 1,700,000 people and a 64 billion dollar economy) through general culture osmosis than I have about the fucking Kardashians, a topic which I will go far out of my way to avoid.* Pretty much the only thing I know is that Idaho produces potatoes. I thought it was that state that keeps electing that crazy racist guy, but it turns out that’s Iowa.** Sorry Idaho, I never should have doubted you or believed I knew two things about you. A relevant anecdote: one time I was in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, and saw an enormous piece entitled Electronic Superhighway: Continental US, Alaska, Hawaii by artist Nam June Paik. It’s basically a giant map of the United States, with each state highlighted in neon and filled with TV screens that depict videos associated with that state. You know, there’s footage from THE WIZARD OF OZ in Kansas, stock car racing in Indiana, lobsters in Maine. There’s usually a couple clips for each one, highlighting the rich tapestry of Americana which gives each place its unique character. Except Idaho. That one’s just fucking footage of potatoes.

Consequently, I was excited to get this gritty, man-on-the-streets tour of Idaho, specifically Pottsville Idaho, which does appear to be a real place. Unfortunately, either Idaho really is exactly as stuck on potatoes as I’d lazily stereotyped it, or THE BEING doesn’t know much more about it than I do, because the movie leans pretty heavily on potatoes, too. About the only thing it adds to my working knowledge of the state is the minor fact that it’s plagued with pesky radioactive monsters.  Which I guess is good to know, but still. It’s basically a JAWS setup, where the responsible local sheriff (Bill Osco, billed alternately as “Rexx Coltrane” and “Johnny Commander” – more about him later) begins to suspect there is a land-shark type monster menacing the local populace, possibly probably certainly due to the huge quantity of toxic waste that’s been squirreled away around town, despite the assurances of slick city guy Garcon Jones (Academy-award winner Martin Landau, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD; also, A TOWN CALLED BASTARD, TRIAL BY TERROR, ALONE IN THE DARK) that radioactive waste is totally safe and only a bunch of superstitious sissies would complain about having it dumped into their water source. At one point he drinks a glass of tap water on camera to prove it’s safe, like that one time Obama did the same thing in Flint Michigan during one of the cringiest lowlights of his whole presidency. But sheriff Lutz knows better. He knows that the only responsible thing to do is to close the potato fields. Wouldn’t you know it, though, the town’s greedy Mayor (Academy-award winner José Ferrer, CYRANO DE BERGERAC, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA; also, DRACULA’S DOG and THE SWARM) is all, “I’m only trying to say that Pottsville, Idaho is a potato town. We need potato dollars. If people can’t get potatoes here, they’ll be glad to get potatoes from the fields in Idaho Falls, Nampa, or Merdian,” and, “Look, we depend on the potato people here for our very lives, and if you close those potato fields, we’re finished.” Fuckin bean-counters, man.

Alas, while Jones is, to all appearances, apparently correct about the safety and perhaps even benefits of ingesting small amounts of radioactive waste (I mean, nobody seems sick or complains about a skyrocketing cancer rate, like you might expect them to) he did overlook the dangerous possibility of that darn radiation mutating the local potatoes into pissed off claw-handed cyclopean dinosaurs. Or at least, I had assumed it was potatoes. There is a character named Marge Smith (Academy award-winner Dorothy Malone, WRITTEN IN THE WIND; that’s right, this movie has three Oscar winners in the cast, two of them with award already in hand!) who has this weird subplot where she’s looking for her missing son, and multiple online sources suggest this son is, in fact, the mutant! If that’s true, boy, I did not pick that up from the movie at all. I just assumed her whole story was totally pointless and arbitrary, which would be totally in line with the movie’s overall quality.  

Yes, to no one’s surprise, really, THE BEING is terrible. It starts out with a promising beheading, but what follows, unfortunately, is a whole, whole lot of nothing, mostly consisting of various probably-improvised little domestic vignettes about the intolerable townsfolk, with very, very little actual mutant anywhere on-screen. I mean, there’s this whole thing with the mayor’s uptight wife (Golden Globe winner and five-time Emmy nominee Ruth Ann Buzzi, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In) running an anti-pornography campaign, and it just goes nowhere at all and I can’t imagine why it’s in the movie. The performances are mostly broad enough that it seems like maybe they’re going for laughs, but shouldn’t there be some, you know, jokes in there, then?

The BEING in question -assuming the title refers to the monster; I guess it could just as easily refer to any of the human characters—likes to hide in confusing places, like the trunk of cars, and then cover its crime scenes in inexplicable mutant slime. Which is fine as far as it goes; the movie doesn’t really 100% commit to the idea that it’s sort of a T-2000 style liquid monster that can assume solid form when it wants, but you could read that as an explanation for why it can turn up such inexplicable places. Uncertain about that, the movie also suggests, hey, maybe it can tunnel? And you can damn well bet it’s one of those monsters that is really into tossing people around with its big rubber hands. One thing it does not like to do, regrettably, is appear on camera. There’s a high enough body count here, but just shots of its claw-like hands slowly approaching victims, or monster-vision sequences of people screaming into the camera, are not gonna cut it in a creature feature. This is especially inexplicable because when we finally get a look at it at the very end, it’s a delightful critter, with a big grin full of pointy teeth and one intense, wiggly eyeball right on the front of his big dinosaur nose. Note to director Jackie Kong: this ain’t a fuckin’ Val Lewton production where the real terror comes from our own imagination. We came for a goddam BEING, don’t hold out on us til the very end of the movie, by which time we’re already too annoyed at having our time wasted to enjoy the experience.

The filmmaking is pretty incompetent, with your expected shots that linger an awkward second after everyone is done talking, storylines that wander off into an amnesic stupor and peter out, scenes lit or mic’d so poorly that even in a pretty crisp DVD copy they’re unintelligible. In that respect, anyway, the movie at least mirrors its protagonist, because despite being correct about closing the potato fields, ol’ Sheriff Lutz is one of the most spectacularly incompetent heroes I’ve ever seen in a movie. He completely fails to convince the mayor to do anything, runs away in terror every time he gets near the creature, and even forgets that he’s been narrating the movie after a single scene. Most egregiously, at one point he demands that Laurie (Academy-Award watcher*** Marianne Gordon, long-time Hee Haw cast member, “Girl Drinking Pepsi at party” in THE LEGEND OF BLOOD MOUNTAIN; also ROSEMARY’S BABY and then-wife of Kenny Rogers!), a local waitresses,**** wait for him after her shift at the diner is over at 7 PM, because he’s worried about her getting home safe, what with the monster attacks and all (not that he’s so far shown any ability to protect anyone). But somehow he manages to spectacularly fail even at the simple task of escorting a pretty blonde from her workplace to her home! Instead, he falls asleep (presumably before 7 PM!) and has a weird dream about getting stuck with Martin Landau in an out-of-control airplane!*****

But wait, there’s more! When he’s awoken by a desperate phone call from the very Martin Landau he just dreamed about, who now claims to have vital, time-sensitive information about the monster, he suddenly remembers his little walking date, and instead of just calling the diner and telling her something important came up and she should just take a cab, he cruises out to the diner where he said he’d pick her up, and finds that she’s just leaving. “Why the hell didn’t you wait for me?” he says, accusingly. “I waited till 11:45, I thought you’d forgotten!” she says, apologetically, despite the fact that she waited for four and a half fucking hours. “I didn’t forget,” he says, sternly. “I got hung up!” By naptime. If Martin Landau hadn’t awoken sleeping beauty with that time-sensitive phone call, the poor girl would probably still be waiting there at sunrise. And oh yeah, about that phone call: also not as big a priority as you might think. Rather than dropping her off at home and hurrying over to address this pressing danger, Mr. Lutz instead embarks on a lengthy adventure with Laurie which includes waiting for the mayor to drive out to a diner where he claims to have caught a mutant (which doesn’t turn out to be there, making his whole “close the potato fields” argument even weaker), and then locking Laurie --the only person so in the movie so far to have done anything proactive about the mutant situation-- in a prison cell “for her protection” (i.e. so she won’t come to the big finale and show him up). Only then does he remember that Martin Landau called in him a panic with vital information, which by this point must be hours ago.

In the big finale, after getting his ass handed to him by the BEING, he tries to escape by climbing a rope up to the ceiling. But then it’s too hard and he just falls back down. Jesus Christ, Lutz, you can’t even run away like a coward successfully.

Despite his flashy dual nom de guerres, Osco provides Lutz with very little in the way of personality (let alone charisma), possibly because his previous experience with cinema seems to have been almost entirely in the porn industry. He was apparently involved in some capacity (his IMDB says “producer – uncredited,” which would fit, since it looks like the whole cast and crew went uncredited) with the X-rated MONA THE VIRGIN NYMPH in 1970 (apparently only the second sexually expli.. --why mince words, we mean porno—film to receive a general theatrical release in the US, after Warhol’s BLUE MOVIE). He followed that up with 15 films in the next five years, including the venerable FLESH GORDON and ALICE IN WONDERLAND: AN X-RATED MUSICAL FANTASY. This apparently made him sufficiently rich to hand Jackie Kong (NIGHT PATROL), his then-wife --a recent college graduate with no professional film experience of any kind-- a check for a couple million dollars to direct a movie starring multiple Oscar-winners.****** Needless to say, this did not prove to be a very artistically productive arrangement; Osco’s acting and Kong’s directing are about equivalently dire, though, so I guess I get the attraction. Kong’s writing and directing does make THE BEING a rare schlocky horror flick from the 80’s which was directed by a woman, though. Not that you’d know that just from watching. Despite starring the director’s husband, there’s no “female gaze” to speak of (with the little bit of nudity going exclusively to women), and there’s plenty of blatant sexism, including poor Laurie getting shut out of the climax “for her protection,” and a lengthy subplot about how much of a intolerable harpy the mayor’s wife is. In fact, there’s so much sexism that I even wondered if it might be intentional parody, but something tells me that kind of subtlety is outside THE BEING’s wheelhouse. The only thing that struck me as a possible intentional joke for the ladies is that the creature ends up being a literal one-eyed-monster!

The movie features a rare Easter setting and was reportedly originally going to be called “EASTER SUNDAY” – always a good idea to name your movie after a holiday and hope it catches on as a seasonal classic. That didn’t pan out for whatever reason, and the holiday setting contributes nothing except a scene where kids on an Easter-egg hunt are unknowingly menaced by THE BEING. Still, the movie does have a theme of redemption: for one thing, mean ol’ Mr. Jones turns out to be a real nice guy after realizing, apparently for the first time, that radioactive waste really might be dangerous to just leave sitting around in rusty barrels in Idaho. More importantly, though, the film concludes with an AMERICAN GRAFFITI style epilogue chronicling the subsequent fates of the characters in white text. I mention it only because even if anyone had grown so attached to these characters that they longed to know what they got up to later on in life, this would still be the lamest and most random possible version. “Virginia Lane was never found,” it tells us, which makes sense because we know she was eaten by a monster. "Marge Smith was last seen looking for [her missing son] in Modesto, California," which, sure, why not? The saddest is Laurie, whose entire subsequent life is summarized as “now waitressing in Akron, Ohio.”

Oh well, at least she got out of Idaho.

* There’s MY OWN PRIAVTE IDAHO, I guess. But doesn’t that take place mostly in Oregon? And then I think they go to Italy, too? If there’s any actual Idaho in there, I only vaguely remember it, and think it may be metaphorical or something.

** A state best known for that verse in Afroman’s immortal jam Colt 45 that goes, “Fucked this hooker in Iowa / I fucked her on credit, so I-owe-huh”

*** Probably.

**** Some websites refer to her as his girlfriend, though he seems more like some sort of controlling stalker than someone she knows and loves.

***** This sequence is elaborate enough that I assume it was originally mean to be, you know, part of the actual plot instead of just a meaningless dream we get to enjoy for the first and only time in the movie. My guess is that it was meant to be the climax, and then the end got rewritten without a plane ride after they’d already shot some of it, and they didn’t want to waste the footage and just stuck it in somewhere and called it a dream.

****** Or so they claim; if this movie actually cost 4.5 million bucks as reported, they must have build the entire town of Pottsville, Idaho, from scratch. That makes me wonder if the entire movie is just an elaborate tax shelter which mistakenly happened to hire Martin Landau and Jose Ferrer and then things got out of hand.

I do want to point out that they did this running-just-in-front-of-a-train bit for real, and it looks dangerous as fuck.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	The Ultimate Terror Has Taken Form. Sadly, it’s a form we’ll only see for about 10 seconds.
TITLE ACCURACY	I mean, it has both human beings and some sort of mutant-being in it, so sure. But that would also be an accurate title for anything from PATTON to GROUNDHOG DAY.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Martin Landau, who went through a period around this time where I think his agent must have had big gambling debts or something. José Ferrerwas not at the pinnacle of his career, but you’d still think he could have done better than this. Dorothy Malone, alas, probably could not have done better by this point; her next feature film was a Spanish horror flick called REST IN PIECES. But! She ended her career on a high note with BASIC INSTINCT in 1992!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None. Well, does Martin Landau count?
NUDITY?	A tiny bit, I believe
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Quite a bit of monster-vision.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Potatoes and radioactive waste are a dangerous combination.

Blood Frenzy

Blood Frenzy (1987)

Dir. Hal Freeman

Written by Ted Newsom

Starring Wendy MacDonald, Tony Montero, Lisa Loring, Lisa Savage, Hank Garrett, Ash Monica Silveria, John Clark

            Back when my friend Tommy first started to work at a major American auto manufacturer, the old company man who was responsible for acquainting the new hires with the finer points of their incipient careers made a remark which has haunted him ever since. This poor trainer was trying to impart upon the his wards the benefits of teamwork, and, clearly trying to speak to the youth of today (this was in 2008 or so), he told them something to the effect of, ‘you know, you need to stick together. Like the Ramones. If the Ramones hadn’t been able to work together, they’d never have been successful.’

            Well, of course Tommy knew this was well intentioned, and he didn’t say anything. But deep in his heart, he knew this was a filthy lie. First of all, the Ramones were never successful. Influential, perhaps, but never successful. And secondly, he knew that they were most certainly not able to work together, because he also knew the original Ramones were the four absolute worst people on Earth. And moreover, they were each uniquely despicable and dysfunctional in conflicting ways almost precisely calculated to cause the maximum possible amount of friction: Joey Ramone was an obsessive-compulsive, sanctimonious prima donna control freak; Johnny Ramone was a ultra-right-wing Ayn-Rand-reading narcissistic sociopath; Dee Dee Ramone was a debased, drugged-up degenerate junkie, and Tommy Ramone was a drummer. The four cornerstones of human misery. If Sartre had known Hell would be these other people, he would have died a much more religious man.*

            I mention all this, because the wikipedia plot description of the 1987 slasher BLOOD FRENZY sounds almost zen-like in its simplicity: A psychiatrist takes a group of her patients out into the desert for a therapy session. They are stalked by a killer. That’s it, that’s the entire plot description as of this date in 2018, and frankly that’s such an entirely succinct and comprehensive plot description of this particular movie that I, for one, feel no obligation to expand upon it. But what that plot description doesn’t really get at is that this “group of patients” being carted off to the desert for a therapy session (???) makes the Ramones look like a barbershop quartet composed of Gandhi, Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and Jesus. There are six of them, to start with, something so perverse even The Ramones wouldn’t have dared. And each is more powerfully repellent than the last. Fortunately it’s easy to tell them apart, because they are all defined by exactly one personality trait, and that trait will establish every single interaction they have throughout the entire course of the movie. They are, in descending order of tolerability,

• An ex-Vietnam soldier with extreme PTSD (Tony Montero, MURPHY’S LAW, TV’s Falcon Crest)
• A non-functional drunk (John Clark, JAGGED EDGE)
• A frigid basket case (Monica Silveria, no other credits)
• A very committed nymphomaniac (Lisa Savage, “woman at picnic” in FOREVER YOUNG)
• A bitchy lesbian (Lisa Loring, Wednesday Addams from the original Addam’s Family)
• And the world’s most intolerable asshole, who if he had survived, spoiler, would almost certainly be a high-ranking official in the Trump administration today (Hank Garrett, DEATH WISH, THE SENTINEL)

(Or, as the video box describes a few of them):

            They are led by arguably the greatest monster here, their psychiatrist Dr. Shelley (Wendy MacDonald, MAYHEM, LEGAL TENDER). Sure, on the surface she seems much less unendurably annoying than her patients, but come on Dr. Shelley, what the fuck were you thinking setting something like this up? Your plan is to drag the six most infuriating people on Earth to an isolated desert location and just, like, camp there while they argue and push each others’ buttons until someone snaps and starts murdering them?

            If so, good plan, because of course that’s exactly what happens. I question if this is standard evidence-based psychological practice, but considering the people involved here, that’s maybe a plan I could get behind, and possibly even something I would argue should be covered by Medicaid. There may be more efficient ways of slowly killing off the six most infuriating people on Earth, but this way gets the job done. Slower than one would prefer, but still effective.

In point of fact, we already had strong reason to believe that BLOOD FRENZY would not entirely limit itself to being an unsentimental exploration of the complex ways in which mental illness expresses itself within a group setting, because we watched a pre-credits sequence wherein a little kid murders his or her drunk dad with some sort of cruel-looking garden instrument over a disagreement involving a jack-in-the-box. Since we don’t see the kid’s face (it appears to be a female child, but they could always be SLEEPAWAY CAMPing us) we have to assume it’s one of the nuts embarking on this little psychological adventure, which sets up an agreeable And Then There Were None scenario which plays nicely off the fact that every one of these people is unpleasant enough to be a likely suspect.

            As for how that scenario plays out, there’s good news and bad news. The good news, and the film’s biggest shock, is that BLOOD FRENZY is actually a reasonably well-assembled production, as far as this kind of thing goes. It looks and feels like a real movie, albeit a cheap one, with perfectly adequate, baseline professional cinematography (by Rick Pepin, who went on to become a prolific producer of sub-SyFy level crap you’ve never seen), editing, (Ruben A, Mazzini, CYBORG), music (John Gonzales, no other credits), and visual effects (John Goodwin, THE THING[!]). I mean, it’s never more than adequate, but it feels like fucking LAWRENCE OF ARABIA compared to something like WINTERBEAST. This was by no means a sure thing, and may even be something of a minor miracle considering the stark fact that BLOOD FRENZY is the sole non-pornographic film in the oeuvre of prolific porn producer and director Hal Freeman (STIFF MAGNOLIAS [seriously], and most, but not all of the venerable CAUGHT FROM BEHIND series, specifically everything but parts 5 and 21-23. I don’t know if he was sick those days or what).

 Freeman, hoping to diversify, believed in this one so much he apparently financed the whole thing himself,** which maybe explains why they put enough elbow grease into it that it looks like something you could show in theaters without overwhelming shame, which was certainly neither necessary nor expected (as far as I can tell, it never was). The acting all around is terrible, of course, but terrible in that particular broad, cartoonish 80’s way which makes these no-budget vehicles more entertaining and charming than they would have been in any other era. Everyone in the cast is game to play their one character trait to the absolute hilt, cheerfully hamming it up enough that the wait for the killings to begin isn’t a total dead zone (Loring, in particular, goes full-on Nic Cage to enjoyably campy effect).

            The bad news, though, is that the wait for the killings to start is way too long. You’ll notice I began this review by talking about the characters --always a bad sign in a slasher-- and that was an unfortunately appropriate place to begin, because although there is eventually some murder, the movie spends an ungodly amount of time sitting around with these bozos before the ax comes down. After the pre-credits stinger, it’s nearly 40 minutes before the next kill, which would be too long a wait even if these weren’t, again, the six most annoying people on Earth. I appreciate the actors’ general high levels of energy and enthusiasm, but we didn’t come here for the story, Mr. Freeman. You would think a porno producer would be even more keenly aware of that fact than your average genre hack, but an easy 15 of the movie’s almost 90 minutes could have have been comfortably excised without sacrificing a single frame of any real value.

The acting is bright enough and the editing is crisp enough that it’s never exactly draggy, but the script, supposedly based on a story by Ray Dennis Steckler (THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES)*** but written by Ted Newsom (who seems to have oscillated between porn [CAUGHT FROM BEHIND 2: THE SEQUEL] and horror [EVIL SPAWN] before gradually segueing into horror retrospective documentaries [FLESH AND BLOOD: THE HAMMER HERITAGE OF HORROR]) seems overly-committed to packing red herrings into its whodunnit structure, to the detriment of the film’s overall momentum. Whodunnits are a legitimate part of slasher standard operating procedure, but obviously in a movie like this, the real draw is the kills, which is unfortunately where BLOOD FRENZY comes up short. There are ultimately enough kills to qualify as a “frenzy” from a technical standpoint (that’s a few more kills than an “incident,” and a few less than a “massacre”), but the movie takes a real long time to get going, and most of the kills are pretty lackluster, simple stabbings or throat-cuttings which don’t make for any giddy highs to offset the plodding narrative (the best kill, a bravura flying pickax impalement, is reserved for the killer, which is an interesting move that probably speaks to Newson’s relative inexperience with the genre).

With too long a runtime and too few showstopper kills, BLOOD FRENZY doesn’t offer a lot of reason to seek it out over the approximately 900,000 other 1980s no-budget slashers you could choose from. But if, like me, you are doomed to watch every one of them after being cursed by an easily offended warlock, you could certainly do much, much worse. It has a cast of colorful --if obnoxious-- characters, a solid production, and enough goofy twists and turns and vicious killings to just barely meet your minimum standards for an acceptable 80’s slasher. And, all things considered, that’s a lot better than you’d have any right to expect from the movie’s pedigree. Considering what they were working with, these guys really came together to pull this one off. Maybe somebody gave Freeman a pep talk about the Ramones.

* How bout that, I bet you weren’t expecting a Sartre joke in this review of 1987’s BLOOD FRENZY.

** Or so says co-producer Claire Cassano in Francesco Borseti’s 2016 book It Came from the 80s!: Interviews with 124 Cult Filmmakers.

*** Again, so says Cassano; Steckler’s name appears nowhere in the film or on IMDB.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	Seven People Walked Into A Private Hell... No One Is Walking Out. Actually it’s eight if you count the audience.
TITLE ACCURACY	The judges have ruled that seven kills is technically a “frenzy.”
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, though Freeman is something of a icon, as his appeal of his conviction for, essentially, pimping (hiring actresses for adult film) resulted in the landmark 1987 Supreme Court case People vs Freeman which effectively legalized pornography in California. Man, Freeman had a busy year in 1987, especially considering he directed 12 more movies that year after completing BLOOD FRENZY.
NUDITY?	Yup, but only a small bit, considering who we’re talking about here.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	A dispute over a jack-in-the-box seems to have started the problems here.
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Probably, but I’ll be damned if I can point to a specific example
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never attempt therapy by driving the six worst people on Earth to an isolated location from which there is no escape.