My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.

— Charles Cecil of Revolution Software, speaking from the Department of Be Careful What You Wish For

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One day in June of 1995, Tim Schafer came to work at LucasArts and realized that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t have anything pressing to do. Full Throttle, his biker movie of an adventure game, had been released several weeks before. Now, all of the initial crush of interviews and marketing logistics was behind him. A mountain had been climbed. So, as game designers do, he started to think about what his next Everest should be.

Schafer has told in some detail how he came up with the core ideas behind Grim Fandango over the course of that summer of 1995.

The truth is, I had part of the Fandango idea before I did Full Throttle. I wanted to do a game that would feature those little papier-mâché folk-art skeletons from Mexico. I was looking at their simple shapes and how the bones were just painted on the outside, and I thought, “Texture maps! 3D! The bones will be on the outside! It’ll look cool!”

But then I was stuck. I had these skeletons walking around the Land of the Dead. So what? What did they do? Where were they going? What did they want? Who’s the main character? Who’s the villain? The mythology said that the dead walk the dark plane of the underworld known as Mictlān for four years, after which their souls arrive at the ninth plane, the land of eternal rest. Sounds pretty “questy” to me. There you have it: a game.

“Not cool enough,” said Peter Tscale, my lead artist. “A guy walking in a supernatural world? What’s he doing? Supernatural things? It just sounds boring to me.”

So, I revamped the story. Adventure games are all fantasies really, so I had to ask myself, “Who would people want to be in a game? What would people want to do?” And in the Land of the Dead, who would people rather be than Death himself? Being the Grim Reaper is just as cool as being a biker, I decided. And what does the Grim Reaper do? He picks up people who have died and carts them over from the other world. Just like a driver of a taxi or limo.

Okay, so that’s Manny Calavera, our main character. But who’s the bad guy? What’s the plot? I had just seen Chinatown, and I really liked the whole water-supply/real-estate scam that Noah Cross had going there, so of course I tried to rip that off and have Manny be a real-estate salesman who got caught up in a real-estate scandal. Then he was just like the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross, always looking for the good leads. But why would Hector Lemans, my villain, want real estate? Why would anyone? They’re dead! They’re only souls. What do souls in the Land of the Dead want?

They want to get out! They want safe passage out, just like in Casablanca! The Land of the Dead is a transitory place, and everybody’s waiting around for their travel papers. So Manny is a travel agent, selling tickets on the big train out of town, and Hector’s stealing the tickets…

This, then, became the elevator pitch for Grim Fandango. Begin with the rich folklore surrounding Mexico’s Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated each year just after Halloween, which combines European Christian myths about death and the afterlife with the older, indigenous ones that still haunt the Aztec ruins of Teopanzolco. Then combine it with classic film noir to wind up with Raymond Chandler in a Latino afterlife. It was nothing if not a strikingly original idea for an adventure game. But there was also one more, almost equally original part of it: to do it in 3D.

To hear Tim Schafer tell the story, the move away from LucasArts’s traditional pixel art and into the realm of points, polygons, and textures was motivated by his desire to deliver a more cinematic experience. By no means does this claim lack credibility; as you can gather by reading what he wrote above, Schafer was and is a passionate film buff, who tends to resort to talking in movie titles when other forms of communication fail him. The environments in previous LucasArts adventure games — even the self-consciously cinematic Full Throttle — could only be shown from the angle the pixel artists had chosen to drawn them from. In this sense, they were like a theatrical play, or a really old movie, from the time before Orson Welles emancipated his camera and let it begin to roam freely through his sets in Citizen Kane. By using 3D, Schafer could become the Orson Welles of adventure games; he would be able to deliver dramatic angles and closeups as the player’s avatar moved about, would be able to put the player in his world rather than forever forcing her to look down on it from on-high. This is the story he still tells today, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t true enough, as far as it goes.

Nevertheless, it’s only half of the full story. The other half is a messier, less idealistic tale of process and practical economics.

Reckoned in their cost of production per hour of play time delivered, adventure games stood apart from any other genre in their industry, and not in a good way. Building games entirely out of bespoke, single-use puzzles and assets was expensive in contrast to the more process-intensive genres. As time went on and gamers demanded ever bigger, prettier adventures, in higher resolutions with more colors, this became more and more of a problem. Already in 1995, when adventure games were still selling very well, the production costs that were seemingly inherent to the genre were a cause for concern. And the following year, when the genre failed to produce a single million-plus-selling breakout hit for the first time in half a decade, they began to look like an existential threat. At that point, LucasArts’s decision to address the issue proactively in Grim Fandango by switching from pixel art to 3D suddenly seemed a very wise move indeed. For a handful of Silicon Graphics workstations running 3D-modelling software could churn out images far more quickly than an army of pixel artists, at a fraction of the cost per image. If the graphics that resulted lacked some of the quirky, hand-drawn, cartoon-like personality that had marked LucasArts’s earlier adventure games, they made up for that by virtue of their flexibility: a scene could be shown from a different angle just by changing a few parameters instead of having to redraw it from scratch. This really did raise the prospect of making the more immersive games that Tim Schafer desired. But from a bean counter’s point of view, the best thing about it was the cost savings.

And there was one more advantage as well, one that began to seem ever more important as time went on and the market for adventure games running on personal computers continued to soften. Immersive 3D was more or less the default setting of the Sony PlayStation, which had come roaring out of Japan in 1995 to seize the title of the most successful games console of the twentieth century just before the curtain fell on that epoch. In addition to its 3D hardware, the PlayStation sported a CD drive, memory cards for saving state, and a slightly older typical user than the likes of Nintendo and Sega. And yet, although a number of publishers ported their 2D computer-born adventure games to the PlayStation, they never felt entirely at home there, having been designed for a mouse rather than a game controller.^[1]A mouse was available as an accessory for the PlayStation, but it was never very popular. A 3D adventure game with a controller-friendly interface might be a very different proposition. If it played its cards right, it would open the door to an installed base of customers five to ten times the size of the extant market for games on personal computers.

But I’m afraid I’ve gotten slightly ahead of myself. This constellation of ideas, affordances, problems, and solutions was still in a nascent form in November of 1995, when LucasArts hired a young programmer fresh out of university by the name of Bret Mogilefsky. Mogilefsky was a known quantity already, having worked at LucasArts as a tester on and off while he was earning his high-school and university diplomas. Now, he was entrusted with the far more high-profile task of making SCUMM, LucasArts’s venerable adventure engine, safe for 3D.

After struggling for a few months, he concluded that this latest paradigm shift was just too extreme for an engine that had been created on a Commodore 64 circa 1986 and ported and patched from there. He would have to tear SCUMM down so far in order to add 3D functionality that it would be easier and cleaner simply to make a new engine from scratch. He told his superiors this, and they gave him permission to do so — albeit suspecting all the while, Mogilefsky is convinced, that he would eventually realize that game engines are easier envisioned than implemented and come crawling back to SCUMM. By no means was he the first bright spark at LucasArts who thought he could reinvent the adventuring wheel.

But he did prove the first one to call his bosses’ bluff. The engine that he called GrimE (“Grim Engine,” but pronounced like the synonym for “dirt”) used a mixture of pre-rendered and real-time-rendered 3D. The sets in which Manny and his friends and enemies played out their dramas would be the former; the aforementioned actors themselves would be the latter. GrimE was a piebald beast in another sense as well: that of cheerfully appropriating whatever useful code Mogilefsky happened to find lying around the house at LucasArts, most notably from the first-person shooter Jedi Knight.

Like SCUMM before it, GrimE provided relatively non-technical designers like Tim Schafer with a high-level scripting language that they could use themselves to code all of the mechanics of plot and puzzles. Mogilefsky adapted for this task Lua, a new, still fairly obscure programming language out of Brazil. It was an inspired choice. Elegant, learnable, and yet infinitely and easily extendible, Lua has gone on to become a staple language of modern game development, to be found today in such places as the wildly popular Roblox platform.

The most frustrating aspects of GrimE from a development perspective all clustered around the spots where its two approaches to 3D graphics rubbed against one another, producing a good deal of friction in the process. If, for example, Manny was to drink a glass of whiskey, the pre-rendered version of the glass that was part of the background set had to be artfully swapped with its real-time-rendered incarnation as soon as Manny began to interact with it. Getting such actions to look seamless absorbed vastly more time and energy than anyone had expected it to.

In fact, if the bean counters had been asked to pass judgment, they would have had a hard time labeling GrimE a success at all under their metrics. Grim Fandango was in active development for almost three full years, and may have ended up costing as much as $3 million. This was at least two and a half times as much as Full Throttle had cost, and placed it in the same ballpark as The Curse of Monkey Island, LucasArts’s last and most audiovisually lavish SCUMM adventure, which was released a year before Grim Fandango. Further, despite employing a distinctly console-like control scheme in lieu of pointing and clicking with the mouse, Grim Fandango would never make it to the PlayStation; GrimE ended up being just too demanding to be made to work on such limited hardware.^[2]Escape from Monkey Island, the only other game ever made using GrimE, was ported to the more capable PlayStation 2 in 2001.

All that aside, though, the new engine remained an impressive technical feat, and did succeed in realizing most of Tim Schafer’s aesthetic goals for it. Even the cost savings it apparently failed to deliver come with some mitigating factors. Making the first game with a new engine is always more expensive than making the ones that follow; there was no reason to conclude that GrimE couldn’t deliver real cost savings on LucasArts’s next adventure game. Then, too, for all that Grim Fandango wound up costing two and a half times as much as Full Throttle, it was also well over two and a half times as long as that game.

“Game production schedules are like flying jumbo jets,” says Tim Schafer. “It’s very intense at the takeoff and landing, but in the middle there’s this long lull.” The landing is the time of crunch, of course, and the crunch on Grim Fandango was protracted and brutal even by the industry’s usual standards, stretching out for months and months of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. For by the beginning of 1998, the game was way behind schedule and way over budget, facing a marketplace that was growing more and more unkind to the adventure genre in general. This was not a combination to instill patience in the LucasArts executive suite. Schafer’s team did get the game done by the autumn of 1998, as they had been ordered to do in no uncertain terms, but only at a huge cost to their psychological and even physical health.

Bret Mogilefsky remembers coming to Schafer at one point to tell him that he just didn’t think he could go on like this, that he simply had to have a break. He was met with no sympathy whatsoever. To be fair, he probably shouldn’t have expected any. Crunch was considered par for the course in the industry during this era, and LucasArts was among the worst of its practitioners. Long hours spent toiling for ridiculously low wages — Mogilefsky was hired to be the key technical cog in this multi-million-dollar project for a salary of about $30,000 per year — were considered the price you paid for the privilege of working at The Star Wars Company.

Even setting aside the personal toll it took on the people who worked there, crunch did nothing positive for the games themselves. As we’ll see, Grim Fandango shows the scars of crunch most obviously in its dodgy puzzle design. Good puzzles result from a methodical, iterative process of testing and carefully considering the resulting feedback. Grim Fandango did not benefit from such a process, and this lack is all too plainly evident.

But before I continue making some of you very, very mad at me, let me take some time to note the strengths of Grim Fandango, which are every bit as real as its weaknesses. Indeed, if I squint just right, so that my eyes only take in its strengths, I have no problem understanding why it’s to be found on so many lists of “The Best Adventure Games Ever,” sometimes even at the very top.

There’s no denying the stuff that Grim Fandango does well. Its visual aesthetic, which I can best describe as 1930s Art Deco meets Mexican folk art meets 1940s gangster flick, is unforgettable. And it’s married to a script that positively crackles with wit and pathos. Our hero Manny is the rare adventure-game character who can be said to go through an actual character arc, who grows and evolves over the course of his story. The driving force behind the plot is his love for a woman named Meche. But his love isn’t the puppy love that Guybrush Threepwood has for Elaine in the Monkey Island games; the relationship is more nuanced, more adult, more complicated, and its ultimate resolution is all the more moving for that.

Tim Schafer did not grow up with the Latino traditions that are such an inextricable part of Grim Fandango. Yet the game never feels like the exercise in clueless or condescending cultural tourism it might easily have become. On the contrary, the setting feels full-bodied, lived-in, natural. The cause is greatly aided by a stellar cast of voice actors with just the right accents. The Hollywood veteran Tony Plana, who plays Manny, is particularly good, teasing out exactly the right blend of world-weary cynicism and tarnished romanticism. And Maria Canalas, who plays Meche, is equally perfect in her role. The non-verbal soundtrack by Peter McConnell is likewise superb, a mixture of mariachi music and cool jazz that shouldn’t work but does. Sometimes it soars to the forefront, but more often it tinkles away in the background, setting the mood. You’d only notice it if it was gone — but trust me, then you would really notice.

This is a big game as well as a striking and stylish one — in fact, by most reckonings the biggest adventure that LucasArts ever made. Each of its four acts, which neatly correspond to the four years that the average soul must spend wandering the underworld before going to his or her final rest, is almost big enough to be a self-contained game in its own right. Over the course of Grim Fandango, Manny goes from being a down-on-his-luck Grim Reaper cum travel agent to a nightlife impresario, from the captain of an ocean liner to a prisoner laboring in an underwater mine. The story does arguably peak too early; the second act, an extended homage to Casablanca with Manny in the role of Humphrey Bogart, is so beautifully realized that much of what follows is slightly diminished by the comparison. Be that as it may, though, it doesn’t mean any of what follows is bad.

All told, then, I have no real beef with anyone who chooses to label Grim Fandango an aesthetic masterpiece. If there was an annual award for style in adventure games, this game would have won it easily in 1998, just as Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle would have taken the prize for 1995. Sadly, though, it seems to me that the weaknesses of both games are also the same. In both of their cases, once I move beyond the aesthetics and the storytelling and turn to the gameplay, some of the air starts to leak out of the balloon.

The interactive aspects of Grim Fandango — you know, all that stuff that actually makes it a game — are dogged by two overarching sets of problems. The first is all too typical for the adventure genre: overly convoluted, often nonsensical puzzle design. Tim Schafer was always more intrinsically interested in the worlds, characters, and stories he dreamed up than he was in puzzles. This is fair enough on the face of it; he is very, very good at those things, after all. But it does mean that he needs a capable support network to ensure that his games play as well as they look and read. He had that support for 1993’s Day of the Tentacle, largely in the person of his co-designer Dave Grossman; the result was one of the best adventure games LucasArts ever made, a perfect combination of inspired fiction with an equally inspired puzzle framework. Unfortunately, he was left to make Full Throttle on his own, and it showed. Ditto Grim Fandango. For all that he loved movies, the auteur model was not a great fit for Tim Schafer the game designer.

Grim Fandango seldom gives you a clear idea of what it is you’re even trying to accomplish. Compare this with The Curse of Monkey Island, the LucasArts adventure just before this one, a game which seemed at the time to herald a renaissance in the studio’s puzzle designs. There, you’re always provided with an explicit set of goals, usually in the form of a literal shopping list. Thus even when the mechanics of the puzzles themselves push the boundaries of real-world logic, you at least have a pretty good sense of where you should be focusing your efforts. Here, you’re mostly left to guess what Tim Schafer would like to have happen to Manny next. You stumble around trying to shake something loose, trying to figure out what you can do and then doing it just because you can. By no means is it lost on me that this sense of confusion arises to a large extent because Grim Fandango is such a character-driven story, one which eschews the mechanistic tic-tac-toe of other adventure-game plots. But recognizing this irony doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you’re wandering around with no clue what the story wants from you.

Compounding the frustrations of the puzzles are the frustrations of the interface. You don’t use the mouse at all; everything is done with the numeric keypad, or, if you’re lucky enough to have one, a console-style controller. (At the time Grim Fandango was released, virtually no one playing games on computers did.) Grim Fandango’s mode of navigation is most reminiscent of the console-based JRPGs of its era, such as the hugely popular Final Fantasy VII, which sold over 10 million copies on the PlayStation during the late 1990s. Yet in practice it’s far more irritating, because you have to interact with the environment here on a much more granular level. LucasArts themselves referred to their method of steering Manny about as a “tank” interface, a descriptor which turns out to be all too descriptive. It really does feel like you’re driving a bulky, none too agile vehicle through an obstacle course of scenery.

In the final reckoning, then, an approach that is fine in a JRPG makes just about every aspect of an old-school, puzzle-solving adventure game — which is what Grim Fandango remains in form and spirit when you strip all of the details of its implementation away — more awkward and less fun. Instead of having hotspots in the environment that light up when you pass a mouse cursor over them, as you do in a SCUMM adventure, you have to watch Manny’s head carefully as you drive him around; when it turns to look in a certain direction, that means there’s something he can interact with there. Needless to say, it’s all too easy to miss a turn of his head, and thereby to miss something vital to your progress through the game.

Now, the apologists among you — and this game does have an inordinate number of them — might respond to these complaints of mine by making reference to the old cliché that, for every door that is closed in life (and presumably in games as well), another one is opened. And in theory, the new engine really does open a door to new types of puzzles that are more tactile and embodied, that make you feel more a part of the game’s world. To Tim Schafer’s credit, he does try to include these sorts of puzzles in quite a few places. To our detriment, though, they turn out to be the worst puzzles in the game, relying on finicky positioning and timing and giving no useful feedback when you get those things slightly wrong.

But even when Grim Fandango presents puzzles that could easily have been implemented in SCUMM, they’re made way more annoying than they ought to be by the engine and interface. When you’re reduced to that final adventurer’s gambit of just trying everything on everything, as you most assuredly will be from time to time here, the exercise takes many times longer than it would using SCUMM, what with having to laboriously drive Manny about from place to place.

Taken as a game rather than the movie it often seems more interested in being, Grim Fandango boils down to a lumpy stew of overthought and thoughtlessness. In the former category, there’s an unpleasant ideological quality to its approach, with its prioritization of some hazy ethic of 3D-powered “immersion” and its insistence that no visible interface elements whatsoever can appear onscreen, even when these choices actively damage the player’s experience. This is where Sid Meier can helpfully step in to remind us that it is the player who is meant to be having the fun in a game, not the designer.

The thoughtlessness comes in the lack of consideration of what kind of game Grim Fandango is meant to be. Like all big-tent gaming genres, the adventure genre subsumes a lot of different styles of game with different priorities. Some adventures are primarily about exploration and puzzle solving. And that’s fine, although one does hope that those games execute their puzzles better than this one does. But Grim Fandango is not primarily about its puzzles; it wants to take you on a ride, to sweep you along on the wings of a compelling story. And boy, does it have a compelling story to share with you. For this reason, it would be best served by streamlined puzzles that don’t get too much in the way of your progress. The ones we have, however, are not only frustrating in themselves but murder on the story’s pacing, undermining what ought to be Grim Fandango’s greatest strengths. A game like this one that is best enjoyed with a walkthrough open on the desk beside it is, in this critic’s view at least, a broken game by definition.

As with so many near-miss games, the really frustrating thing about Grim Fandango is that the worst of its problems could so easily have been fixed with just a bit more testing, a bit more time, and a few more people who were empowered to push back against Tim Schafer’s more dogmatic tendencies. For the 2015 remastered version of the game, Schafer did grudgingly agree to include an alternative point-and-click interface that is more like that of a SCUMM adventure. The results verge on the transformational. By no means does the addition of a mouse cursor remedy all of the infelicities of the puzzle design, but it does make battering your way through them considerably less painful. If my less-than-systematic investigations on YouTube are anything to go by, this so-old-it’s-new-again interface has become by far the most common way to play the game today.

In other places, the fixes could have been even simpler than revamping the interface. A shocking number of puzzles could have been converted from infuriating to delightful by nothing more than an extra line or two of dialog from Manny or one of the other characters. As it is, too many of the verbal nudges that do exist are too obscure by half and are given only once in passing, as part of conversations that can never be repeated. Hints for Part Four are to be found only in Part One; I defy even an elephant to remember them when the time comes to apply them. All told, Grim Fandango has the distinct odor of a game that no one other than those who were too close to it to see it clearly ever really tried to play before it was put in a box and shoved out the door. There was a time when seeking the feedback of outsiders was a standard part of LucasArts’s adventure-development loop. Alas, that era was long past by the time of Grim Fandango.

Nonetheless, Grim Fandango was accorded a fairly rapturous reception in the gaming press when it was released in the last week of October in 1998, just in time for Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead which follows it on November 1. Its story, characters, and setting were justifiably praised, while the deficiencies of its interface and puzzle design were more often than not relegated to a paragraph or two near the end of the review. This is surprising, but not inexplicable. There was a certain sadness in the trade press — almost a collective guilt — about the diminished prospects of the adventure game in these latter years of the decade. Meanwhile LucasArts was still the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of goodwill, thanks to the many classics they had served up during those earlier, better years for the genre as a whole. Grim Fandango was held up as a sort of standard bearer for the embattled graphic adventure, the ideal mix of tradition and innovation to serve as proof that the genre was still relevant in a post-Quake, post-Starcraft world.

For many years, the standard narrative had it that the unwashed masses of gamers utterly failed to respond to the magazines’ evangelism, that Grim Fandango became an abject failure in the marketplace. In more recent years, Tim Schafer has muddied those waters somewhat by claiming that the game actually sold close to half a million copies. I rather suspect that the truth is somewhere between these two extremes. Sales of a quarter of a million certainly don’t strike me as unreasonable once foreign markets are factored into the equation. Such a figure would have been enough to keep Grim Fandango from losing much if any money, but would have provided LucasArts with little motivation to make any more such boldly original adventure games. And indeed, LucasArts would release only one more adventure game of any stripe in their history. It would use the GrimE engine, but it would otherwise play it about as safe as it possibly could, by being yet another sequel to the venerable but beloved Secret of Monkey Island.

As I was at pains to note earlier, I do see what causes some people to rate Grim Fandango so highly, and I definitely don’t think any less of them for doing so. For my part, though, I’m something of a stickler on some points. To my mind, interactivity is the very quality that separates games from other forms of media, making it hard for me to pronounce a game “good” that botches it. I’ve learned to be deeply suspicious of games whose most committed fans want to talk about everything other than that which you the player actually do in them. The same applies when a game’s creators display the same tendency. Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.

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Sources: The book Grim Fandango: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Jo Ashburn. Retro Gamer 31 and 92; Computer Gaming World of November 1997, May 1998, and February 1999; Ultimate PC of August 1998. Plus the commentary track from the 2015 Grim Fandango remaster.

Online sources include The International House of Mojo’s pages on the game, the self-explanatory Grim Fandango Network, Gamespot’s vintage review of the game, and Daniel Albu’s YouTube conversation with Bret Mogilefsky.

And a special thank-you to reader Matt Campbell, who shared with me the audio of a talk that Bret Mogilefsky gave at the 2005 Lua Workshop, during which he explained how he used that language in GrimE.

Where to Get It: A modestly remastered version of Grim Fandango is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Well, Kamala Harris has had her fun with all those “progressive” voters, in and at the edge of the Democratic Party, who were much taken—or taken in, better put—as the vice president played the empathy card in her many statements of concern for the fate of the Palestinians of Gaza. Let us be clear, to borrow one of Harris’s favorite locutions: If she wins on Nov. 5 and a Harris administration comes to be next Jan. 20, there will be no deviation whatsoever from the Biden regime’s limitless, unconditional support for Zionist Israel’s expanding campaigns of terror in West Asia. 

We know this now, after months of Harris’s “strategic vagueness”—how artful this New York Times phrase, an apologia for political deviousness in two words—because The Times has just published a remarkable piece of “news analysis” making it clear indeed that Harris’s campaign-trail talk “should not be confused with any willingness to break from U.S. foreign policy toward Israel as a presidential candidate.” 

Wow. My mind tumbled instantly back to the leaked transcript of that six-figure speech Hillary Clinton gave to a roomful of Wall Streeters during her 2016 campaign. I say one thing to the great broad masses out on the hustings, she told the assembled financiers, but pay no attention. I’m telling you here that we’re in this together. 

Ah yes, politics in the land where all is artifice and nothing need be sincere. 

If this news meant merely more of the same it would be grim enough, given the spectacle of Israeli savagery that confronts us daily. But in my read the Harris people have put us on notice that the U.S., should she emerge the victor in a few weeks, will back Israel as unequivocally, as it does now, while the Zionist regime continues to ignore international law and escalate across the region. 

Cases in point: Just in the past couple of weeks the U.S. has bombed targets in Yemen from which Houthis have been firing missiles into Israel, while, on President Biden’s orders,  sending Israel a highly sophisticated missile-defense system and 100 troops to operate it. There is only one conclusion to draw at this point: Support of this kind cannot continue without the U.S. taking on another war. 

One can hope only that all those dreamers who dreamed Kamala Harris would bring something new to this U.S.–financed spree of bombing and murder—who don’t understand the dynamics of the American imperium’s policy in West Asia, this is to say—have awakened, none too gently, from their slumber.

Assiduously and cynically, Harris has cultivated delusory expectations at the left-hand end of the Democrats’ garden ever since party elites and donors imposed her as the 2024 candidate last spring. Here she is July 25, as reported by NPR, after a meeting in Washington with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister:

What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating … We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.

And here are Katie Rogers and Erica Green reporting in The New York Times just prior to a Harris campaign stop in Michigan last Friday, Oct. 18:

Ms. Harris’s office and campaign declined to give specifics of what a Harris administration’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza would look like, in large part because the conflict is too volatile to predict how it might be managed days from now, let alone months from now.

But one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail Ms. Harris’s thinking, said that if she won the election and the war were still going on, her policy was not expected to change.

Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wait. Rogers and Green report that the strategically vague Kamala Harris cannot say what her Israel policy will be because things in Gaza and beyond are too dynamic, changing by the day, and then quote an unnamed U.S. official who can assure us her Israel policy will not change no matter what happens one day to the next? You have to love the logic in this reporting. Keep this up, Ms. Rogers and Ms. Green, and you could be on for a Pulitzer next spring. 

Here’s another good ’ern, as an old farmer I knew used to say, from Rogers and Green:

Even if Ms. Harris were not aligned with Mr. Biden’s current approach—and her advisers stress that she is—she would not bow to political pressure and upend U.S. foreign policy at a precarious moment in the conflict, just days before an election. 

Say whaaa? What does “not bow to political pressure” mean? This is The Times’s cotton-wool English at its best, or worst, and as so often it requires translation. In this case: A Harris administration will pay no more attention to popular opinion than the Biden regime has paid to date because American foreign policy must not be subject to the will of the electorate. It does not matter, therefore, how many Americans want the U.S. to stop supporting terrorist Israel’s genocide. The horror show shall go on. 

To keep the scorecard up to date, a CBS poll in June, the most recent I can find, indicated that 61% of those surveyed favored an arms embargo against Israel. This compares with 52% three months earlier, according to a poll commissioned in March by the honorable people at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows—not when the direction of the wind is of no account.  

Katie Rogers and Erica Green give us a study in authorized propaganda, pointedly insistent as it is, in four separate passages, that Harris is fully committed to keeping the bombs and money flowing to apartheid Israel. We are left to wonder why a piece of this kind appears out of the blue, a coup de foudre when read in the context of The Times’s coverage of Harris. And why now, given the Harris campaign’s vulnerability to constituencies opposed to the Zionist state’s savagery, chief among them Arab–Americans in Michigan? 

Has Harris’s rhetoric, hollow as it has been, nonetheless prompted a case of nerves among donors who support the Zionist cause? Has the Israel lobby put its foot down? Did the Netanyahu government signal enough already with the sympathy for Gazans, as it makes us look bad? It is impossible to say. My best read is that the American public is being prepared for the U.S. to stay with “the Jewish state” as the mess it makes grows more dangerous and yet more brutal. 

■

If Harris is set to embrace her inheritance in West Asia from the Biden regime, just as her people now say, what is it Harris will face should the vice president become president? This is answerable in two words: very unfortunately. The man who leaves U.S. foreign policy in ruins across both oceans, and the world in greater disorder and peril than it has been since 1945, will bequeath his successor, if Harris so proves, another war. 

We should have seen this coming, actually. The savagery in Gaza will go on until there is nothing left of it or its people: This is clear now that the Israelis have assassinated Yahyah Sinwar, the Hamas leader, and continue—no, escalate—their assault on the Strip’s remaining population. The Pentagon positioned the Navy and a modest contingent of troops off the Lebanese coast shortly before the Israelis began their attacks on Lebanon. Secretary of State Blinken now talks openly of “regime change” in Beirut —a coup, in plain English. There is nothing in this to suggest we can expect even a murmur of objection from a Harris White House as Israel proceeds with Netanyahu’s “seven-front war.” 

Last Thursday, Oct. 17, the U.S. sent B–2 bombers to strike underground bunkers in Yemen, from which the Houthis have for months attacked Red Sea shipping lanes in solidarity with Palestinians. Let’s call it official: The U.S. is now directly waging war alongside the Zionist regime on one of its seven fronts. 

More to the point, in my view, is how Lloyd Austin explained this move. “This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach,” the defense secretary said, “no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened or fortified.” If you do not read this as an aggressive warning to Iran you cannot read. 

The yet-bigger news came a week earlier, when the Pentagon confirmed that President Biden had ordered it to send Israel one copy of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, along with 100 uniformed technicians to operate it. THAAD, as this technology is commonly known, is a highly advanced missile-defense shield. Alert readers may recall that the Chinese freaked out some years ago, when the South Koreans agreed, not without coercion, to accept THAAD systems on their soil. 

The Israelis, The Times of Israel reported at the weekend, have already asked for a second such system. Just planning ahead. 

Trita Parsi, who directs the Quincy Institute in Washington, read the significance of this bit of American military largesse as well as did anyone in an email note dated Oct. 15:  

By deploying the THAAD system to Israel, along with roughly 100 U.S. service members, Biden has taken a massive step toward pulling the U.S. into a larger regional war. Rather than deterring Iran, Biden is reducing the risk and cost of widening the war to Israel while increasing the risk and cost to the U.S. Had Biden refrained from adding additional defensive capabilities to Israel after it needlessly intensified the conflict, the cost of escalation would have been higher for Israel—perhaps even prohibitive. Israel would have thought twice. But because Israel knows that Biden will come to its defense every time it ups the ante, Netanyahu has few reasons not to escalate. And with Biden’s latest step, regional war may now have become inevitable.

“Inevitable” is just another word for a very great deal to lose as the unfunny farce of U.S.–Israeli relations proceeds no matter who comes out the winner next month. Sending U.S. troops to Israel to run THAAD systems is to step straight into the trap Netanyahu has set, drawing the U.S. that much closer to direct involvement in the biggest of the Israeli leader’s fronts.  

Friends I greatly respect, several of them, say we have to look past Harris’s shortcomings (to keep things courteous). It all depends on who she names as her top advisers, this line of reasoning runs. This is precisely what Harris will depend upon and this is why the prospect of a Harris presidency is so worrisome. History warns in no uncertain terms these will be the same Deep State ideologues—many of whom are committed to the Zionist cause—who have run foreign policy the whole of the post–Cold War era, if not longer. The electorate’s preferences and aspirations will have no more to do with the formation of policy than they do now.  

In 1935, 89 years ago, W.E.B. du Bois published a book called Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois was concerned with African–American contributions to the post–Civil War United States, but he took on much more than this before he was finished. In this noted work he parsed three renderings of the modernizing U.S. In one, America would finally achieve the democracy expressed in its founding ideals. In another, he pictured an advanced industrial nation whose distinctions were its wealth and potency. And in the third these two versions of America’s destiny were imagined in combination. This would be something new under the sun, an amalgam that would make America history’s truly great exception. 

Empire abroad, democracy at home: It has never been more than an impossible dream. Du Bois considered it “the cant of exceptionalism,” in his biographer’s phrase. And this is the story of American politics as we have it in 2024. It is what Kamala Harris — and hardly is she alone, in fairness — has on offer as she commits to a rogue client while pursuing the White House. It is what those among her supporters who think she can make any difference in West Asia — or anywhere else, for that matter — dream about. 

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Associated Press

By David Tilotta

The U.S.S. Enterprise — the iconic spaceship from the original Star Trek television series — was designed in 1964 by Art Director Matt Jefferies using input from series-creator Gene Roddenberry. Two models of the ship were built for filming — a small, 33-inch version and a large, 11-foot version (approximate sizes). 

The history of the large filming model has been extensively documented because it was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1974. It was restored during 2014-2016 and is now visited regularly by Star Trek and other science fiction enthusiasts.

But what about the small model — the model that wasn’t used a great deal but served as the prototype for the large one?

Roddenberry with the 33” miniature on his desk, ca. 1976

After the original series ended, and prior to the late 1970s, that beloved model sat on Roddenberry’s desk. Then, around the time that Star Trek—The Motion Picture (ST—TMP) was being filmed, Roddenberry loaned it to Paramount through Jon Povill (based on a November 5, 1979 memo from Roddenberry to Jeffrey Katzenberg) and it vanished… for approximately 45 years… until it turned up in a storage locker in California in October 2023.

What was the model doing there? What was (probably) its last filming voyage? 

This article will answer these questions because the author acquired several rolls of 35 mm film that accompanied the model in the storage locker. The film shows the 33-inch model, which has been independently corroborated, as well as other objects and scenes. From the telecined footage of all of the film, the author has learned that a rainbow multiplex hologram of the model was fabricated. This article will present the evidence for this. 

Be forewarned, however, that this story is still unfolding. Accordingly, when new information is learned, this article will be updated.

The Multiplex Holographic Process

Before getting into the details of the connection of the small Enterprise model to holography, it’s necessary to trip the light fantastic and go forth and multiplex.

In simple terms, a hologram is a three-dimensional image of an object produced by light that is shined through an interference pattern or patterns. Often, the interference pattern(s) is obtained by shining laser light onto the object and then combining it with laser reference light onto photographic film or other detection apparatus.

The multiplex hologram, also called an integral hologram or a composite hologram, is a unique type of hologram that was popularized in the surrogation sequence that occurs towards the end of the 1976 movie, Logan’s Run. It was also used in the electro-mechanical game "Gun Smoke" that was mainly seen in Japan. This type of hologram was first identified in 1967 by Robert Pole at IBM. Eventually, Lloyd Cross at the University of Michigan refined the technology to make it efficient and commercially viable. Cross would go on to form The Multiplex Company located in San Francisco. More about this company in a bit.

Video clip from 1976’s Logan’s Run featuring six multiplex holograms. Note how the rainbow effect shifts vertically in relation to the camera’s height to the hologram.

A multiplex hologram using the Cross technology was basically created in two steps. The first one involved placing an object on a rotating turntable and photographing it under studio lights using a synchronized camera. A 35 mm Mitchell camera loaded with black and white (B/W) film was typically used, and Cross determined that, in order to produce a relatively smooth hologram, one frame of film needed to be captured for every 1/3 degree of object rotation. Note that the photographic process developed by Cross favored the horizontal axis. This will be relevant later.

A frame from a roll of 35 mm film found in the storage locker with the Enterprise rolls. The roll was used to create a multiplex hologram and the slate marked the start of the turntable rotation. Note the studio light "barn door" visible on the right. This particular film of a man dressed as Santa Claus was shot in 1979 by Robert Hollingsworth, who worked at BHI at the time and was supposedly the lease holder of the storage locker.

After the film was exposed, it was processed like any other B/W film.

The second step in the Cross process was to place the film in a special printer — called a multiplex printer — to generate the hologram. The multiplex printer worked by shining monochromatic laser light through each frame of film in succession. The laser light was then passed through special lenses in order to shape it into a thin vertical image where it was combined with reference laser light, also shaped into a thin vertical image, onto the surface of a large (about 9+ inches in height) photographic plate. The two laser beams — the one that passed through the film frame and the one from the reference — resulted in a thin, vertical interference pattern on the plate for each frame. 

Essentially, what the multiplex printer did, was to convert all the frames of film into thin vertical interference patterns on the photographic plate. The resultant hologram has geometry similar to a vertical blind… but much smaller, of course… where the “louvers” approximately represent the frames of film. When this photographic plate, or a copy of it, is curved into a semi-circle or circle and illuminated from within, the light waves from the object on the rotating table are recreated from the interference patterns when you walk around it (or when you rotate the hologram). The three-dimensional nature of the object arises because one eye looks at one vertical strip and the other eye looks at a different, adjacent one that is spatially separated. 

One additional, important detail: The Cross process utilizes a technique developed in 1969 by Stephen Benton of Polaroid. Benton determined a way to create holograms so that they could be viewed using white light in addition to monochromatic laser light. Cross employed a variation of Benton’s work so that his multiplex holograms could be viewed using ordinary Edison-type, incandescent white light bulbs. The tradeoffs, however, are that these types of holograms essentially lose their vertical parallax and the resultant holograms break into rainbows in the vertical direction. This is why they’re sometimes referred to as rainbow holograms.

The Making of the Small Enterprise Model Hologram: How Many Studios Did It Take?

Now, onto the small Enterprise hologram and where the ship hits the film cans.

Not counting the laboratories that processed the film, making the hologram of the small Enterprise model involved four studios: Paramount Studios, Burton Holmes International (BHI, sometimes known as Burton Holmes Incorporated), The Howard A. Anderson Company, and The Multiplex Company. Here are the details.

• Paramount Studios, that first started working on Star Trek II/Star Trek Phase II before switching to ST—TMP, likely loaned the small model to BHI to photograph it on the rotating turntable, perhaps with the forgotten permission of Gene Roddenberry. BHI was one of several “pass-through” studios that worked with The Multiplex Company. 

It’s been reported that Robert Abel and Associates (RA&A) obtained the model for their work on ST—TMP. However, according to Richard Winn Taylor who was employed by RA&A as the lead designer on ST—TMP — until RA&A was removed in February 1979 — the model was never there. Taylor says that RA&A only ever saw the incomplete Don Loos television build for the aborted series.

One of three film canisters containing multiplex and related film shot and/or used by BHI. Note the older Burton Holmes business card, from before BHI was formed from BH Travelogues, in the middle of the bottom of the can, on the right.

• Burton Holmes International photographed the model on the rotating turntable to obtain the footage for the multiplex hologram. It is at this point that the model was likely physically modified by, among other things, adding metallic foil diffraction grating tape to some of its windows. This was done to bring the model to life by reflecting the studio lights as it rotated on the turntable. 

For unknown reasons, only a 120 degree hologram — approximately a half circle — was requested. Therefore, the model was photographed over that arc against a black background. The edge codes of the 35 mm B/W positive film that was generated during this photography indicates that it was done in either 1978 or 1979 because both dates appear on the film’s Kodak stock in different rolls. After the BHI film had been processed, likely by Consolidated Film Industries and/or Hal Mann Laboratories, the Howard A. Anderson Company worked on it further.

And what became of the small model of the Enterprise? It was likely retained by BHI until the company went inactive in the mid to late 1980s. At that point, many of the assets of BHI were put into storage and the model went with it … and out of public view.

A frame of film from one of the rolls showing the photography of the model on the turntable. The "lit" windows are metallic foil diffraction grating tape.

• The Howard A. Anderson Company, a name that should be known to Trek fans worldwide since they were responsible for a lion’s share of the optical effects in The Original Series, added (composited) a “space” background to the model footage complete with stars and a comet. This was done in 1979 in order to give an otherwise static model even more life.

Left: A frame from a roll of reference film from a B/W workprint of the 11-foot Enterprise model supplied by the Howard A. Anderson Company. The roll was found in one of the BHI film canisters and was used as an example of a star field for the work done on the compositing of the 33-inch model. Right: A screen cap from the episode, “Let That Be Your last Battlefield,” which matches the Anderson workprint film, minus the text.

Upper right: A frame from the film leader of the composited Enterprise film. Note the very faint, very large Howard A. Anderson Company logo superimposed over the black background. Lower left: The Howard A. Anderson Company logo shown as reference.

• The composited film, deemed as complete and as a lively as possible, was shipped to The Multiplex Company where the final hologram was manufactured using their special printer.

A frame of the finished, composited film by the Howard A. Anderson Company.

A photograph of the hologram made from the small Enterprise model in the Vintage Lasers and Holograms Museum, courtesy of Mr. Jerry Diaz. Compare the Enterprise in this picture to the one shown in the previous photo.

Whither the Hologram?

So, what did Paramount need with a holographic starship? And where is that hologram today?

It was produced, and a version of it is in Tempe, Arizona.

According to Bob Hess, the owner of the Vintage Lasers and Holograms Museum located in Tempe, the hologram was supposedly made for the premiere party of ST—TMP. He learned this from Joe Belk, who worked for The Multiplex Company and who gave Mr. Hess a rejected copy of the hologram. Given the time that has elapsed since the premiere of ST—TMP, however, it has been difficult to find confirmation of this.

You can see the hologram if you visit Mr. Hess’s museum, which I encourage you to do. It’s fascinating and educational.

According to Mr. Hess, there are a couple of caveats with respect to viewing the hologram today, and these limitations slightly impact how exactly the hologram matches the found film.

1. The hologram has some scratches in it due to handling and age.

2. It was originally presented to Mr. Hess as a flat photographic plate so he had to insert it into a period correct holder. His is for a 360 degree hologram.

3. The original illumination of the hologram was via an Edison light bulb. Today, it’s lit with a modern semiconductor variety so it might introduce some distortion in the appearance of the hologram.

4. The hologram was originally rejected by The Multiplex Company, likely due to a printing error, so there’s some distortion in it around its middle.

Despite these limitations, the hologram is eminently viewable and pretty neat. And you can even see the stars in it if you look carefully, though they don’t show up well in photographs.

A close-up of the multiplex hologram made from the small Enterprise model composited with the space elements, the latter difficult to photograph. Note the thin vertical segments in the hologram.

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About the Author

David Tilotta is a Star Trek fan and memorabilia collector and has co-written (along with his writing partner, Curt McAloney) 22 original series collecting and history articles for the official Star Trek webpage. He is also a co-author of the book, Star Trek: Lost Scenes (ISBN: 9781785653773, Titan Publishing, 2018, 270 pp.), with Curt McAloney. By day, he is a Professor Emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

He’s also a key member of our FACT TREK family. This is his first article for us.

Acknowledgements

Any errors in this article are the author’s but he is indebted to the following for their assistance:

• Jerry Diaz

• Bob Hess

• Gary Kerr

• Michael Kmet

• Bill Kobylak

• Maurice Molyneaux

• Mike Okuda

• Mark Stevens

Resources

• “White Light Holograms,” Emmett N Leith, Scientific American, Vol. 235, No. 4 (Oct. 1976), pp. 80-95.

• The Multiplex Company Hologram Brochure (link)

• Sharon McCormack Collection and Archives (link)

• Burton Holmes, Extraordinary Traveler (link)

• Logan’s Run and How It Was Filmed, by ASC Staff, The American Cinematographer, April 17, 2020 (link)

• FACT TREK video interview with Richard Winn Taylor, August 2024, conducted by Maurice Molyneaux

Superlatives from a subterranean cult classic

By: Toxicka Shock | ToxickaShock@gmail.com

C.H.U.D. is a movie that has a newfound relevance in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that governments can “ban” homeless people from simply existing in the public sphere. It’s one of the most egregious, dehumanizing holdings to roll down from Washington in quite some time — a patently inhumane edict that smacks of the cruel pro-eugenics social engineering movement of the early 20th century (which likewise had the high court’s judicial blessing.) It’s a ruling that essentially legalizes ethnic cleansing, just as long as you’re using “economic standing” as a stand-in for the “ethnic” part. It’s the most sadistic indictment of capitalism I can imagine: a social order where one’s value and civil rights hinge entirely on how much money they have to their name. You’d think there would be more outrage over such a Nazi-like SCOTUS decision, but let’s be real — Americans, as an amorphous throng, have never really given a shit about what happens to the homeless.

Which circles back to C.H.U.D. Here’s a movie from the middle of the ‘80s where the powers that are in New York City let untold numbers of homeless people die — and turn into irradiated creatures — simply because no one gives a damn if destitute people sleep in toxic waste. If anything, the people that wrote the movie probably overstate how much public blowback the nuclear waste dumping scandal would actually generate. There are multiple scenes where would-be whistleblowers tell the bureaucrats they’re gonna’ blab to the press — today, I’m not even sure the New York Times would bother covering it, unless they can somehow use it to benefit the Trump campaign. A couple of bag ladies get turned into toxic zombies, so what? As long as they’re not stealing shampoo from the shelves of Walgreens, I don’t see the Facebook Boomers coming out in droves to protest.

Considering more recent events, it’s certainly interesting to go back and watch this movie 40 years later — and see just how little progress we’ve made, as a nation, on addressing the issue of coast to coast homelessness in America. Maybe C.H.U.D. was meant to be a stinging political allegory, but in execution it comes off as more of a straight B-monster movie — we all know the city big wigs that cover everything up are the REAL bad guys of the movie, but when you’ve got turd-covered atomic panhandlers stomping around eating puppies and stuck up middle aged broads, it’s only a matter of time until you HAVE to default to the exploitative camp school of filmmaking. 

And on that front, there are quite a few things to dig about C.H.U.D. — even stuff outside of its obvious social commentary …

Those funky, phat-ass synth beats!

It was pretty much an unwritten but universally observed rule that if someone made a horror film in the early 1980s, it had to have a spooky-yet-groovy synthesizer score. Composers Martin Cooper and David Hughes obviously got that memo, as C.H.U.D. features some of the most underrated genre movie synth music of the entire decade. Furthermore, it’s a pretty novel score, too, with an emphasis on slower, chunkier and more downbeat tunes. You can easily envision a buncha’ contemporary SoundCloud rappers using the soundtrack as a baseline for beats — especially that dismal but funky ass opening scene theme!

Daniel Stern!

Daniel Stern is easily the best thing about this entire movie. While everybody else in the film turns in rather staid and unremarkable performances (including leading man John Heard, who would reunite with Stern for Home Alone five years later), Danny absolutely chews the scenery throughout C.H.U.D., whether he’s taking NYC bureaucrats to task for (poorly) trying to cover their paper trail or shouting the fact that he’s a reverend in addition to heading up the neighborhood soup kitchen at every available opportunity. His cracked out hairdo has more personality than just about any other fully developed character in the whole movie, really. 

The cameo appearance by John Goodman!

Well, maybe calling it a “cameo appearance” is a bit of a stretch, since Goodman was far from a household name at the point he appeared in this movie. Fittingly enough, that same year he starred as the sleaze ball head football coach in Revenge of the Nerds, so he definitely covered his bases well in ‘84. Goodman is literally only in the movie for about three minutes — his cop characters shows up at a diner, orders a cheesburger, kinda’ sexually harasses a waitress and then he gets eaten (offscreen) by a gaggle of rampaging C.H.U.D.s. He certainly made the most of his limited screen time here — wonder if he ever had flashbacks to filming this one on the set of King Ralph or The Babe?

The monster design!

It’s not easy coming up with a unique design for a horror movie monster. Thankfully, the design for the titular Cannibal Humanoid Underground Dwellers is a bit more inspired than most mainstream-ish genre flicks from its time. Rather brilliantly, the eyes of the monsters are neon yellow, which gives a nice offset to the rather bland dark-green zombie flesh look of the rest of the creature. But just you wait! The creatures also have the ability to elongate their necks until they look like zombie brontasauri! It might not be as nightmare-inducing as the practical effects on The Thing, but it’s unsettling stuff all the same. 

The authentic early ‘80s NYC sleaze!

And this might be the best overall thing about the entire movie. The scum-tasting negative utopia of early ‘80s NYC just doesn’t exist anymore, so this film depicts a long lost civilization in all of its grandiose grossness and griminess. Cinematographer Peter Stein certainly had a knack for showcasing New York City’s seedy underbelly at its absolute sleaziest and slimiest. Amazingly, the sewer scenes aren’t even the nastiest and scuzziest locales in the movie: from disgusting soup kitchens to police stations in dire need of a top to bottom mopping, virtually every scene in this movie just screams “pass the hand sanitizer, will you?”