Written years ago by a buddy, Simon Johansen, a.k.a. Peregrin Toker, for an old 'verse featuring the Sovereignty and the Bragulans! Edited to fit SDNW4.
Here And Now: The Latest News On The Galaxy's Rich And Famous (3398 Edition)
Wesley Prefect Birkin
By Simon Johansen
By some strange coincidence, the two most famous filmmakers from the United Solarian Sovereignty happen to be polar opposites, other than both have done theirs to blur the semantical difference between "famous" and "infamous". The first is C. J. Motonow (3218-3338), best known for his remakes of
Star Wars. Calling a Motonow movie "bizarre" is often claimed to be a great understatement; one of his films, the aptly titled
Fried Fish consisted mostly of close-ups upon fish frying upon a pan accompanied by lots of exposition whereas another,
Tapestry Woven With Swords, was made by patching together footage from old TV news into a remotely coherent story. If there is one thing which unites Motonow's movies is that they (usually) make perfect sense despite resembling hallucinations more than actual movies.
The second most famous Solarian director is Wesley Prefect Birkin, born in 3360 in Margarethea City on Auriga. While the films Wesley Birkin, who usually leaves out his middle name, often go far beyond what normal directors are willing to do, that does not mean that Wesley Birkin is some sort of avantgarde auteur like Motonow, quite the opposite.
As reviled as he is, though, you cannot escape Wesley Birkin. He churns out movies at an impressive rate, often directing three or four each year, and people actually pay to see them. It is also common knowledge in the USS that an Aurigan cocktail parties and film festivals is not complete without the appearance of a walking coathanger of a man, who usually looks more at home in an oddly-named punk rock band than a fancy dress party, with a certain mohawked Tiffaine Sinclair lookalike on his arm, followed by one of two different exclamations from that odd couple:
My name is Katarzyna Granzowa and I survived MetaBrawl!
My name is Wesley Prefect Birkin and I was paid to direct (insert name of movie).
Each exclamation is usually followed by all the guests dropping their jaws and staring in disbelief towards that couple, even though most of them have heard the same approximately 10,191 times earlier. It is jokingly referred by movie fans to as the greatest mysteries that of the universe that:
- A non-metahuman such as Katarzyna Granzowa entered MetaBrawl and survived physically intact.
- Wesley Birkin has even come within a chance of making movies.
- A pretty lady such as Katarzyna Granzowa, who could practically get any potential spouse she wanted, not only married Wesley Birkin but also stars in every movie he has made over the last three years.
But how did all this begin? And how did an otherwise very friendly person end up as the most hated filmmaker of all time?
As mentioned before, Wesley Prefect Birkin was born and raised in the Aurigan city of Margarethea, where he went to an expensive private school from which he graduated with flying colours in 3377. Throughout his high school years (3368-3381) he decided that he would be a filmmaker upon seeing
The Speed Of The Ninja and took Film Knowledge as an optional class for his sophomore year. According to former classmate Douglas Dent, a 16-year old Wesley Birkin vowed loudly to himself in front of his classmates that "
When I start making movies, film enthusiasts shall never forget my name". Ironically, he was told by some "
be careful what you wish for, for it may come true".
Expectedly, he went on to study filmmaking at the University of Margarethea and in 3387, he published his doctoral thesis
The Dynamic In Zombie Madness XII's Interlogistically Multipolar Imperatives: A Study In Transrelatoric Gender Forms. This explains why his cult followers often refer to him as "Dr. Birkin", as well as why he sometimes is credited in opening credits as "Wesley Prefect Birkin, PhD".
However, even while he was working on his thesis, he was also working on an ultra-low-budget movie starring a cast which not only was of unknowns, but of literal amateurs. It was not released until January 3388, when a small company called Success Film picked it up, added some rudimentary post-production and marketed it under the name
The Final Showdown.
The Final Showdown, which was banned in Byzantium, purported to be a martial arts action film and starred Birkin's friend Douglas Dent as Spike Monsanto, a CEID-Zero agent tasked with infiltrating "The Berserker Cult", a shadowy organization of ninja who sold Kasanarium. Dent was cast in the role due to having dabbled in martial arts with no other instruction than an obscure book on the matter he purchased from a now-defunct Holo Net site once. Incidentally, he happened to be the only cast member who had as much of a vague resemblance of a beforehand experience with martial arts. All the extras were merely given photocopies of the book in question a week before filming. However, in the "
The Making Of The Final Showdown" featurette on the same disc, Birkin and Dent both explained that they did their best to give the extras as thorough a knowledge of the ancient art
Tenshin Shoden Shinkage Shinto Booga Booga-ryu as detailed in the book owned by Douglas Dent.
The supposed plot, however, had little to do with what actually happened on screen; several reviewers described the script as simultaneously being an exercise in sticking to whatever sets, props and costumes the filmmakers had access to for free and a product of what film reviewers call the "You know what? This would be cool!" syndrome.
Nonetheless, it was a sign of what was to come from Wesley Birkin.
Later the same year, with
The Final Showdown still being relatively obscure to the vast bulk of the galaxy despite having become familiar to B-movie worshippers due to its unintentional humour, Birkin was brought in to direct an adaptation of the cult comic book
Death Is Unimportant To Me due to being a major fan of the comics, which revolve around the adventures of a sarcastic hired gun who has returned from the grave to wreak havoc upon his former employers.
During the pre-production, however, Birkin came into not so few arguments with screenwriter Alexis Bremer due to the early drafts of the screenplay not having enough in common with the ultraviolent gallow's humour of the original comic book. Nevertheless, Wesley Birkin agreed to the third draft and the film premiered in February 3389.
Death Is Unimportant To Me was Wesley Birkin's ticket to fame as a director, as mixed as the response was.
Non-readers of the comic found either found it simultaneously awkward, tasteless and offensive-for-offensiveness'-sake or relished in how over-the-top it was. Fans of the comics, however, found that Birkin and Bremer had both misunderstood the source material completely and produced an unintentional parody.
However, it did introduce one of the greatest one-liners of all time to those unfamiliar with the comics, namely:
Yeah, try walking into my dojo and fight under our rules. It's called Kick-Dick-Do and we train in the deadly art of nut kicking all day. Now that's what I call full contact. Oh wait, we also have an affiliated art developed by my late sensei called ass stuffing where we use dildos.
Due to Alexis Bremer being unavailable for the following three years due to writing on a completely unrelated movie called
Nice Knowing You, however, Wesley Birkin also wrote the screenplay in addition to directing the 3390 sequel
Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience.
Though
Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience stuck as closely to the comics as the preceding, the script had that added extra strange touch which Birkin appears to give all movies whose scripts he writes, and it was generally considered inferior to the first movie. In Birkin's defense, however, he had to adapt the more ambiguous and surreal later era of the comics to the screen, which was no easy task for a screenwriter.
Years later, however, it appears that while
Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience has its fans, most of them watch it for the cheesiness factor and its cult status first and foremost.
It still made money, and most notably, every film enthusiast now knew who Wesley Birkin was. This caused a great many fans of the
Death Is Unimportant To Me movies to seek out
The Final Showdown, leading to a huge growth in the cult around that movie.
The same year, a company called Sidewinder Cinema, which was on the brink of bankrupcy, had recently gotten completely new owners who were interested in bringing whatever brand name cast and crew they could afford, as well as becoming the leader in action movies. The latter dream was one they shared with Wesley Prefect Birkin, and they thusly employed him as their chief screenwriter and director. This is often considered the true beginning of what film enthusiasts call Birkinian Madness.
In March 3391,
Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple premiered. Everything which his previous movies hinted at was present in this movie, but to a much greater extent and much more explicitly. It certainly squeezed the budget for all it was worth, using it mostly on gunfights, though it is arguable to which an extent the script was a product of the "This would be cool" syndrome. It also introduced another infamous "trademark" of Birkin's, namely that of characters suddenly popping in and out of the plot. (thought to be connected to the "this would be cool" syndrome)
Oh yes, the plot. It is not as if you walk into a movie called
Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple expecting much of a plot. However, this movie literally consisted of someone walking or driving somewhere and then getting into a gunfight, sometimes when driving, with each gunfight getting progressively more over-the-top. Well, at least as over-the-top as the budget would let it be. Strangely, practically every reviewer agreed that the camerawork in
Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple was very good. The only thing it lacked to be Wesley Birkin's defining moment was the plethora of "just because" scenes of which
The Final Showdown has been described as a montage.
The "just because" scenes motivated by either budget constrains (and in those cases stretched to absurdity) or an overactive imagination on Birkin's art, though, would make their full return in
Touch of Death which debuted half a year later. Made in practically no time (thanks to extensive use of stock footage), Birkin described
Touch of Death in an interview as based upon the first draft for
The Final Showdown, which included all of the scenes which he did not have the money to film, though the overall plot (or what passed for plot) was somewhat altered, due to Success Film owning all the copyrights to
The Final Showdown.
Touch of Death was basically the same story, though, but this time of Calvin Steinbeck, a CBI agent from Solaris who arrives on the Seche (incidentally the planet where Sidewinder Cinema are based) to assist the planet's police in fighting an unnamed criminal syndicate. Due to a much larger budget, however, this one was overall better technically, and benefited from the addition of a few car chases. Interestingly, the car which Steinbeck drove in
Touch of Death used to be owned by Wesley Birkin himself. (he had recently bought a new one, meaning that he had a disposable car for the shooting)
Of course, it was an abject failure if judged as a piece of art, and the only area where it was remarkable as craftmanship was the fight choreography; it has actually become a cult classic among martial artists due to being one of the few action movies in existence where the hand-to-hand combat scenes use realistic martial arts.
Roughly simultaneously with
Touch of Death, Sidewinder was shooting an equally low-budget horror movie using the same cast, also scripted and directed by Wesley Birkin. It was universally panned by its critics for its simultaneous incoherency; an example beneath:
The Undead is about... well, some archeologists are excavating some sort of mysterious place and then people start disappearing. Then some sickly-looking strangers wander a bit about and frighten the archeologists, who immediately decide that the strangers are undead.
Then, it suddenly goes from confusing to confusing and ridiculous halfways through this. It looks as if our pals at Sidewinder Cinema jettisoned the previous script, or what passed for a script. Suddenly, one of the archeologists remembers that he had brought lots of guns and ammo with him; something which they appear to have ignored for the first three disappearances and all the appearances of the undead.
The really ridiculous thing is that the undead, who cannot even be called ghouls because they do not even attempt to eat anyone, suddenly turn out to have been summoned by a nearby evil wizard (portrayed by Wesley Birkin himself, wearing a silly purple robe) who suddenly, having been conveniently ignored for the most of the movie, arrives in a van with his own private stash of machine guns which he hands out to his undead minions.
And then, after a ten-minute discussion consisting of the head archeologist and the wizard yelling Shakespeare quotes at each other, the wizard sees the error of his ways and faces off in a deadly machine gun duel against one of the undead, who has suddenly gained a black belt in Gun-Kata. For reals. Of course, there is little gore, mosty just shots of someone firing off a flurry of bullets and then cut to a group of people falling about.
The only critics who gave
The Undead good reviews did so because they found it unintentionally hilarious, prompting perhaps the only time that Wesley Birkin described one of his own movies as substandard:
Wesley Birkin wrote:Okay, I have pulled a clunker there with The Undead. The end result is totally indefensible, I know. The guys at Sidewinder Cinema wanted me to make two movies this year, and write the scripts for them, too. To make a long story short, I wrote the entire script for The Undead in a couple of days with little afterthought. I'm obviously not the man for the job either, I had the feeling throughout the writing process that the end result would not be as good as Touch of Death and Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple, which I believe will soon be considered modern action classics. I'm simply not a person who can make horror movies.
Learning from the mistake of having Birkin direct and script a horror movie, Sidewinder Cinema finally OK'ed his request for a three-month vacation and let other, less known but also less reviled, filmmakers, take care of the next films they were to direct; save for a film which both would be Sidewinder Cinema's first cinematic release and Birkin's last movie for Sidewinder.
Ironically, that movie would leave its mark in the public consciousness as both the epitome of both Sidewinder Cinema and Wesley Prefect Birkin. The movie was
Dissident Aggressor, debuting in 3393, the story of a never-named man living in a militaristically utopian community isolated from the outside universe who one day finds out that he - and all his friends - are in fact genetically engineered beings manufactured as disposable super-soldiers.
Just like
Dissident Aggressor is perhaps the best representative of what Birkin's films represents, so are the reviews quoted below the best representatives of the two most common opinions on Wesley Prefect Birkin:
I am sure that one day in the far future, this Wesley Prefect Birkin will be hold single-handedly responsible for the cultural decline of the Sovereignty, or at least a symptom of it. This filmmaker cannot possibly be an Aurigan or even a Sovie, as Dissident Aggressor is such a haphazard and backwards movie that only the Haruhiists, the Shepistanis or the more degenerate parts of Shinra could have spawned it. It takes a premise which would perhaps have been considered somewhat intelligent a few centuries ago, and then does practically nothing with it. Calling the characters "stereotypes" would be too kind towards Birkin's skill as a screenwriter. Even describing the film as having a plot would be inaccurate; it does not even pretend to be coherent. In the 33rd century, the best-known filmmaker of the USS was C. J. Motonow. In the 34th century, we get... Lennart Kaufmann and Wesley Birkin?
The best comedies are always the unintentional ones, and Dissident Aggressor is proof of this. As an example - in one scene, when Our Hero (tm) has been wounded by his pursuers and is hiding in a little house. Then, he removes a bullet from his arm and eats the potted plants in the house... and the wound starts healing. I am not making this up. Remarkable is also the scene where Our Hero hitch-hikes a lift from someone who just happens to read Orion's Guardian and believes all his claims to his background. It's not as if not much is done with the Orion's-reader; the scene is merely an excuse for yet another car chase with the conspiracy theorist frantically commandeering a trusty KSC 550 (and seriously, how many readers of the Orion's Guardian can afford one of those?) while Our Hero (tm) blazes away at the pursuing jeeps and cop cars with a machine gun, standing up through the car's sun roof.
In the autumn of 3393, Birkin formed his own production company, the aptly named Birkin Film Group. Though he would never again work with budgets as big as that of
Dissident Aggressor, that did not quell his enthusiasm the slightest. By June 3394,
Kung-Fu Cavemen premiered with a box-office record for a Wesley Birkin movie which had not been seen since his adaptation of
Death Is Unimportant To Me, though that was most likely due to two factors. The first was of course, the title. The second was that the fight choreography had been supervised by none other than Katarzyna Granzowa, self-proclaimed "Most Dangerous Woman Alive" and supposedly the only unaugmented human to enter MetaBrawl and survive. Ingeniously enough, Birkin let volunteers do all the promotional work, which actually was fairly easy due to the enormous cult following which
The Final Showdown has.
What made the galaxy drop their jaws even further was that by the time it premiered, the tabloid A Look Inside wrote that Wesley Prefect Birkin and Katarzyna Granzowa were madly in love with each other. This was further confirmed by both rival tabloid Watch and Listen and the behind-the-scenes photographs for Birkin's next movie
Alexandra Wong, P. I. (which premiered in the late November of 3394) where Granzowa played Arcadia Kafka, the foil to Alexandra Wong as portrayed by model Jill Heng (no relation to CEID-4 director Casey Heng). Again, the critics poured their derision down upon the resulting movie.
Holy product placement, Batman! I do not think that I saw a single car in Alexandra Wong, P. I. which probably had not been donated by AuriMotor. And considering the frequency of car chases, this is essentially the only car commercial I have ever paid for seeing. But it is not just a commercial for LARCs, though. The guy sitting besides me in the theatre noted that every single gun seen was manufactured by Solarian Arms.
This movie plays like an exercise in how not to make a police drama. A witness appears to assist Alexandra with The Damning, but said witness barely gets any screen time. Subplots about an attempted assassination of another witness, a police chief who may or may not be a double agent and a paramedic who moonlights as a drug runner are thrown about and never picked up again.
One, however, had something very interesting to say:
Remember when intellectuals say that action movies use violence as a metaphor for sex? Well, Alexandra Wong, P. I. is direct proof of that. It appears that Birkin wanted to film two hours of non-stop lesbian sex between Katarzyna Granzowa and Jill Heng but did not have enough money on hand to coerce Jill Heng into that. I mean, what else should I make of the fact that the climactic "gunfight" (read: strap-on dildo orgy) happens in the locker room of a swimming bath? By the time they run out of ammo and Jill and Katarzyna are fighting hand-to-hand in their bikinis (seriously, who the hell thinks that Jill Heng could stand a remote chance of defeating Katarzyna Granzowa?), they are only one hard step away from 69'ing each other. And when they both collapse from exhaustion at the end of the fight, they could just as well be exhausted from lovemaking as for fighting.
However, the uniform trashings of
Alexandra Wong, P. I. provoked something unexpected. A group called the Agents of Birkin appeared to vehemently defend Wesley Prefect Birkin and his movies publically. Most of these were the cult audience of his films, not just
The Final Showdown, but many of them were Sovereignty culturalists who praised Birkin for "reclaiming the action movies from the cultural hegemony of Anglia".
With the Agents of Birkin on his side, he went on to, in a lightning period of time, have three movies out in 3395.
One was
Screaming For Vengeance, an unofficial sequel to
Dissident Aggressor set in Carthago Secundus. (Birkin could not afford the actual copyrights) It featured Elijah Duncan as a total amnesiac who one day goes to a therapist and finds out that he actually is Z-3381, a genetically engineered superbeing and a product of a cancelled super-soldier project. When the CEID find out about this, they dispatch an endless series of hitmen to get rid of Z-3381. The critics described it at "what
Dissident Aggressor would have been like with the budget of
The Final Showdown" (Sovereign Star) and "an exercise in getting the most gunfights and car chases out of the fewest money, story be damned". (Schlock & Awe Magazine)
The other was the techno-fantasy outing
The Hunt Has Begun. In
The Hunt Has Begun, twelve warriors from "opposite corners of this universe" - one of whom, Morana, was played by Katarzyna Granzowa almost covered entirely in elaborately patterned blue bodypaint (and very little other than that) - gathered upon a "wasteland planet" to hunt each other for the sheer pleasure of the hunt, using only close-combat weapons. Strangely enough, this is perhaps the best critically-received Birkin movie yet, though this may have something to do with the outfit (and blue bodypaint) Katarzyna Granzowa wore as Morana, not to mention the now-infamous publicity photoshoot of her posing on one of the sets in full costume (including bodypaint).
The third of the movies, the space-pirates-attempt-to-loot-a-haunted-starship flick
The Blood-Staining, was ignominously dubbed the "Greatest Failed Opportunity" of the year by The Tarsonis Herald. Other reviewers, however, recalling
The Undead, remarked that Birkin had at least made an actual horror movie, though even the positive reviews remarked that it in tone altered oddly between ordinary horror and splatter between each act. In a somewhat odd move, every singly of the living characters dies in a very bloody manner; by the time the movie ended every single character, except the never-really-explained nasties aboard the ship, was dead.
For the year 3396, he unveiled a mammoth book which he had spent the last two years writing in total secret. The book was Reel Bad Sovereignty, a veritable encyclopedia of stereotyped depictions of people from United Solarian Sovereignty in films made in the Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya and (especially) the Byzantine Imperium.
A few excerpts:
Wesley Birkin wrote:Today, you would almost expect the villain in an action movie to speak with a Sovereign, especially Solarian, accent and display caricaturized versions of stereotypical Sovereign mannerisms. Now, this would hardly bat an eye if this applied to movies made inside the USS. However, this also applies to action films from practically elsewhere in the Koprulu Zone, if the villains. And if the Sovie is not a major villain, a burly Tarsonian or a stereotypical effete Solarian appears amongst the henchmen or as comic relief.
A question this negative stereotyping and outright defamation of Sovies raises is: What influence does this have on politicians? To which extent is this the cause of the growing discord between the different Koprulu Zone nations?
However, what made this book garner much implication was Birkin's implications that Haruhiist-based critics hated him solely because he was from the United Solarian Sovereignty, made his films with Solarian funding and Solarian cast and crew. He even explicitly likened himself to a 34th century Sergio Leone in the book. As a result, many saw the book as a well-inteded analysis which Birkin turned into a vanity project of his. As his wife said:
Katarzyna Granzowa wrote:I think that Wesley went a bit over the top at times, but I think he has done the right thing. After all, had I been a Hollywood actress 500 years ago I would have taken a similar issue with Hollywood's en masse vilification of the Slavic peoples, no doubt sparked by the Cold War at first and later by the Yugoslavian Civil War.
If anything, the book made more people take Birkin seriously, and it certainly elevated the view the various intellegentsia of the galaxy viewed him.
It certainly helped to cushion the impact of the later-discredited rumour the same year that Birkin would direct a live-action version of the surreal cult animated series
The Sulphurous Glow Of Fimbulwinter (which won Useless Reviews' 3389 award for Weirdest Head Trip Ever Committed To Film Since C. J. Motonow Disappeared). A lot of film fans actually believed the rumour; Wesley Prefect Birkin had actually confessed frequently to being a huge fan of
The Sulphurous Glow Of Fimbulwinter. Nevertheless, most fans of
Fimbulwinter were enraged and sighed in relief as the creative team behind
Fimbulwinter confirmed that a live-action
Sulphurous Glow was not even planned.
Just as they were relieved, so did the July of that year see the cinema premiere of T
he Ginger-Undead Bragulan, Wesley Prefect Birkin's most intentionally strange film yet. As the title implied, this film was about a Bragulan warlord who was reincarnated as a gingerbread man and went on a rampage inside a Human Enclave on Wild Space (played by Nemedia, a geographically and astronomically similar USS planet). Not surprisingly, the "flashbacks" to the life of the Bragulan warlord were actually taken directly from an old shot-on-location documentary about the Bragulan Star Empire. Of course, this time the critical response were the usual...
While Wesley Prefect Birkin can certainly write about movies, he unfortunately cannot write the movies themselves. But he tries.
Good news: Birkin is not making a live-action adaptation of The Sulphurous Glow of Fimbulwinter.
Bad news: He has just made something which somehow manages to make even less sense than Fimbulwinter.
If only the title character was played by a Bragulan dressed up as a gingerbread man. Still, you have not lived until you have seen a cookie walking around with a K-bolter and gunning down everyone in sight while howling praises to Byzon to the skies? Seriously, the entire script is just some sort of strange justification to make this happen. Continuity and logic be damned.
Later the same year, not one or two, but three more movies of Birkin's making hit the screen. The first was the oddly-titled
Is It Supposed To Be God? wherein a Katarzyna Granzowa played a CEID-Zero agent tasked with the search for the Holy Grail. It faced many of the same criticisms as
Dissident Aggressor (namely: That the plot basically was a concept which may once had been considered intelligent which had been used basically as an excuse for car chase after car chase), in addition to accusations of blasphemy leading to most Byzantine theatres being unwilling to show it. Even more strangely, this film was scored by none other than NecroLucifer with all of the band's members making cameos at various points. It even had several Ninja making an appearance.
Second was
crime does not pay (Birkin insists to this day that its title must be written in lower-case letters entirely). This was Birkin's first movie supposedly based upon a true story, this time about the police's attempt to catch the master burglar Apollo Beltran, who was famous for the bizarre schemes he used to commit robberies, often improvising them from seemingly random combinations of objects used to make odd traps and other devices. This film is generally considered incredibly dividing - half of the population consider it the only decent script Birkin ever penned, the other half consider it one of the dullest mystery movies in recent memory.
Third was
I Taste Better With A Golden Center, which prompted Schlock & Awe Magazine to have an editorial in its December 3396 year about the increasing obtuseness of Birkin's film titles. The film itself, while both praised and derided (depending on which reviews you read) for being 90-minutes a barely-dressed Katarzyna Granzowa killing people in increasingly weird ways, marked the second Birkin-penned one-liner to make its entrance into everyday slang among geeks, uttered by Katarzyna Granzowa's character Louise Tesla:
No way am I a tough kickass bounty hunter. I don't wear near enough eyeliner.
Fourth was a supernatural thriller which in the words of Useless Reviews rounded out "The Oddly-Named Quartet",
They All Float Down Here! This, incidentally, happened to be the second Birkin movie scored by NecroLucifer, who in the meantime admitted to being members of the film cult around
The Final Showdown.
An excerpt from their review of
They All Float Down Here!:
If Freud wrote an action movie while smoking liberal doses of Good Ol' Mary Hwanna, the result would be not unlike They All Float Down Here!. The beasties are supposed to be material incarnations of traumatic memories... or the unconscious parts of the subconscious... or just the hive-mind of the galaxy's collective subconsciousness. My head hurts from trying to make this make sense. But at least it did end with an atomic blast.
It certainly was not a movie any viewer ever forgot, as it within its first 20 minutes featured a holiday resort overran by zombies, the Grim Reaper's younger sister (portrayed by the one and only Katarzyna Granzowa) "harvesting" people to the tunes of NecroLucifer's Before The Host Of The Fallen Angels and a man tearing open his skin in order to reveal a completely inhuman creature underneath, every of those scenes culminating in either a huge shootout or kung-fu fight of course. Oddly,
They All Float Down Here! has been recently accumulating a cult following similar to that revolving around
The Final Showdown. Some even think of it as a live-action successor to the ancient
Heavy Metal, referring to the NecroLucifer score, bizarre visuals and abundance of violence and female nudity.
Upon finding out about this, Birkin immediately started appearing at film cult events and said in an interview in February 3397:
Wesley Birkin wrote:
I am pleasantly surprised by the immense following They All Float Down Here! has acquired. If things continue this way, after my death they will reflect upon me the way they currently reflect upon C. J. Motonow. I mean, nobody were particularly interested in Vincent van Gogh's paintings and the books of Herman Melville and Howard Phillips Lovecraft when they still were alive.
Tiffaine Sinclair, descendant of C. J. Motonow, actually seriously considered suing Wesley Birkin for that remark. A notion which, fortunately for Birkin, did not blossom into reality.
The undaunted Wesley Birkin took one step further: He literally reached out to those who enjoy his movies because they find them cheesy by personally appearing on various B-movie festivals on Auriga together with Katarzyna Granzowa, who reportedly almost overheated during showings of bad martial arts movies with commentary about how unrealistic and/or badly choreographed the fight scenes were. In addition to evidently having a lot of fun doing it, both used it as a way of audience research which would be used for their next movie.
This movie, the last directed and written by Wesley Prefect Birkin to open in theatres yet, was the swords-and-sorcery film
Red Haired Devil starring Granzowa with an orange wig as Shula, a wandering warrior who teamed up with Prisciann (Aghora Romero), an androgyne turning out to be the last living Atlantean Mage and numerous other characters which Wesley Birkin deliberately drew from the ranks of stereotypes in the genre. Opposing them was a similar variety of stock characters including such foils as Edur (NecroLucifer guitarist Nevada Leonard), amazingly good-looking and amazingly evil long-haired prettyboy, his annoyingly persistent right-hand man Kazyon (Sadamoti Matsushima) and the insane jester Belenus (Gabriel Dirkenschneider). Birkin actually admitted to writing the script for
Red-Haired Devil as an exercise in combining as many clichés he remembered from role-playing games and fantasy novels.
Birkin is currently working on a film called
Reptiloid about a genetically engineered secret agent from the Haruhiists infiltrating the Zigonian republics, who requests the assistance of a CEID-Zero agent who happens to be a Kung-Fu master. Godspeed, Dr. Birkin.
Filmography:
The Final Showdown (3388)
Death Is Unimportant To Me (3389)
Death Is Unimportant To Me 2: It's Just A Minor Inconvenience (3390)
Martial Monks of the Gun-Kata Temple (3391)
Touch of Death (3391)
The Undead (3391)
Dissident Aggressor (3393)
Kung-Fu Cavemen (3394)
Alexandra Wong, P. I. (3394)
Screaming For Vengeance (3395)
The Hunt Has Begun (3395)
The Blood-Staining (3395)
The Ginger-Undead Bragulan (3396)
Is It Supposed To Be God? (3396)
crime does not pay (3396)
I Taste Better With A Golden Center (3396)
They All Float Down Here! (3396)
Red Haired Devil (3397)
Reptiloid (currently filming)