Stories of the '87 Season 3: "Culture" War

Blasted the headline for a BircherSports item published in the December 21 newsletter (initially appearing on the new Prodigy page, which launched December 18). "We fought a Revolution of Responsibility in 1980, but the Revolution is being Lost through our passivity and compliance with Global Communism, Morenovism, Liberalism of the Bad Kind (Cultural), Agnosticism, and Serfdom," railed Cassius "Curly" Bourbon, new BircherSport culture critic, "to quote one of their vile maniacs, 'What is to be done?" 

The subject of the article focused on The Sunshine Six, a low-budget independent action movie released to 846 movie theaters on  Christmas Day by Live Entertainment. It did pretty well for a movie of its kind, earning $1.9 million and selling out at some locations--namely in the rust belt, plains, and Mid-South.

A sort of homage to The Black Six, the film follows six football stars (Bo Jackson, Irv Eatman, Randall Cunningham, Brian Bosworth, Mark Gastineau, and Ali Haji-Sheikh) who grew up in a Catholic orphanage in Dayton, Ohio, a city now devastated by The Great Offshoring. The "brothers" return to their hometown after another successful season to find that their beloved Mother Claudia (Tuesday Weld) was crucified in their small church; the cops have arrested Antwan (James Bond III in his first real role since The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh), a beloved "little brother" now aged out but still helping the children of St. Mary of Egypt. The six believe Antwan's claims of innocence and receive help from Augustine, or "Auggie," a Spanish Civil War vet (Laurence Olivier, in his final role) and long time friend of Mother Claudia, who helped run their mutual aid network--it is revealed that he was always in love with her, but her marriage to God and his to The People prevented any relationship-- and Gerta (Bridgette Neilson), a fellow orphan and love interest of Dougie (Gastineau) (her backstory reveals she was abandoned by her East German refugee parents to the orphanage because she got in the way of their successful dry cleaning business, corrupted by the shallow American Dream--ed.). 

With the cops pinning the grisly crime on Antwan and no support from the archdiocese, who simply want the case to go away, the Sunshine Six, Auggie, and Gerta reveal a conspiracy connecting local cops, the Vatican, and the CIA. Mother Claudia was actually killed by a shadowy CIA agent (Michael Ironside) and Cardinal Heydrich, the Archbishop of Dayton (Max Von Sydow) to cover up a successful operation that dumped drugs and Newport cigarettes into the community at the same time of massive austerity, funneling people into the arms of religious authorities. The Sunshine Six start an old-fashioned guerilla war, eventually defeating the CIA and Archbishop, as well as their psycho goons, including a Knights Templar Captain and maniac named Vult (James Remar). The Six realize, at the end of the film, that they have only won The Battle of Dayton; the war continues. 

One could not have surmised the film’s plot from the ad drops, which featured elaborate action sequences: Bo running up the side of a brick wall before leaping and firing a grenade tipped arrow at a black helicopter; Cunningham scrambling from police before throwing a grenade-taped football at an ominous white van; Mark Gastineau tackling a machine-gun toting Vul, donned in full medieval body armor; Bosworth flying his Harley off a ledge while outrunning siren-blasting cop cars; Sheikh kicking another football taped with grenades; a beret-doffed Laurence Olivier, cigar in mouth, slowly smiling before cocking his rifle; soft-focused Neilsen. Total fun action trash with a high-tempo keyboard score. 

Birchers made hay about the director, Strother Olen Oates, who had fashioned a career out of left-leaning hyperviolent low-budget B-Movies; Oates got wider notice in ‘86 for his magnum opus Motor City Massacre, a remake of the 1935 Socialist Realist sci-fi classic Loss of Sensation, about Charlie (Alex Winter), an ambitious engineering student at a Big 4 manufacturer's institute who develops a perfect robot worker. Charlie's intentions are pure but naive: the son and brother of auto workers and union men, he hopes his invention finally overcomes the contradictions of capitalism by doing away with the need of labor; robot workers, employed in all manufacturing, would eliminate the need of accumulation and competition. This alienates his father Rick (Claude Akins) and his older brothers Nick and Joey (Clancy Brown and Bill Paxton), who know How the Gears Turn in the sickos who run their lives, with Rick warning him that one can't just relieve the tension between Bosses and Working Men and Women with phoney baloney quick fixes. In exile, the prodigy is taken in by Lee Iacocca-esque executive Harvey Fender (George Pepard), who immediately does what Charlie's dad and brothers warn (it should be noted that the film was completed before that Lions-Bears Monday Night game and the Chrysler's exec's "assassination"--like any good American, Oates exploited the event by naming the film after it; the working title was Charlie Pepper's Robots--ed.). When his creation is used to crush a strike, Charlie tries to intervene, dying in the process; Nick tinkers with his brother's invention and creates a liberation army; the film ends like Sunshine Six: while this episode is over, the wider conflict continues.

Oates also received a Lenin Prize for the work at the same time as Morenov's controversial awarding to the retired NFL players (see last year's annals --ed.), which the Birchers deduced probably led to this new film. But the intellectual trash king's other works--Havana Knights, Roast the Potatoes, Brother (one title--ed.), The Kabul Connection, The Gentleman: The Muammar Gadafi Story, John Brown vs. The Cabal of The Seventh Seal: A Havana Knights Story--were relegated to dusty mom and pop video store shelves domestically (very few were even burned during the Fall '86 protests). Their only wide releases to lazy Commie countries like Italy and West Germany and Behind the Wall (Mosfilm released dubs of his works to wide acclaim). How did The Sunshine Six get a theatrical release? And so many stars! BircherSports Culture Critic August Schlap bemoaned Sir Olivier's appearance, questioning the thespian's cognizance. 

Reports that Al Davis wept at the scene in which Bo carries Auggie on his back out of an exploding police station could not be corroborated.