def-con 4

DEF-CON 4


Before we start today, super deluxe exciting, globe shattering and life altering news. No, not sink holes leading into the bowels of Hell, Gulf Of Mexico oil spills being hit with hurricanes and spewing petroleum laden droplets of rain throughout the east coast which if Baby Jesus is on my side would descend on wife #2 just as she was lighting a cigarette, but something even better. I know this is hard to believe, as a running, shrieking, ex-wife cabob is really hard to beat in the Things That Make Our Nipples Hard department, but trust me on this. I have now made available two more paper books for your pleasure. The first is Life After The Collapse,
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/life-after-the-collapse/11179055
, and the second is Homesteading For $3,000,
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/homesteading-for-%243000/11178749 .
Now, I don’t feel bad about this shameless plea for additional sales because, one, I pretty much have no shame, and two, you aren’t risking much by ordering. Homesteading is available as a free download through my web site, http://www.bisonpress.com/ . You can preview it first. Collapse, also at the web site, has a sample page covering the first twenty pages of the book ( about ¼ of the book ). You should know by reading the sample page if you will like the book. My profit is about $1.50 on each one. Not bad, considering I’ve given away thousands of copies of Homesteading for free ( just as you shouldn’t begrudge me any profit on the Bison Newsletter book, since I did all that writing for free, originally ).

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I wanted to put the movie “Def-Con 4” in my post-apocalypse movie review book, but I only had it on VHS and I couldn’t find my VCR. NetFlix didn’t offer it on DVD. However, last weekend I cleaned out the van and came across the machine. I will be donating it to the thrift store on the next trip in to town, so I had one opportunity to once again watch and review this movie. I can’t say for sure if this is my absolute all time favorite post-apocalypse movie, I can’t be sure. It would be in contention with “The Road Warrior” and a few others. But it is one of my top favorites. I believe it is the one I’ve watched the most. I simply can’t conceive of anyone hating this movie. The reviews over at Amazon were pretty much either “worst ever” or “four stars” with little in the middle. Wooden acting? Bad script? Nitpicking the title? These people probably think a good post-apocalypse movie was Terminator Four. A few of the actors were bad, but most were okay to average. The script did not have any inexcusably large holes in it. The budget wasn’t extravagant more was it niggardly ( if you want to have fun proving to yourself both how hostile minorities are and how ignorant public school graduates are, use that word in the ghetto ). It was adequate for all but the gameboy crowd that requires special effects costing tens to hundreds of millions in their comic book movies.

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Def-Con 4 was, quite simply, one of the best movies portraying the realities of life after the collapse. You don’t have to actually experience a collapse to logically conclude what most likely will or will not happen. It isn’t rocket surgery. Let’s take the mega-turd Terminator Four which was especially disappointing in comparison to the previous three and is a prime example of special effects being unable to compete with talent. Look at “Clerks”. Even if you hated the humor ( I loved it ), it showed how easy it was to avoid the standard Hollywood budget bloat. Four didn’t even begin to compare with the original, which in comparison, and even adjusted for inflation, was a lot cheaper. In the Four universe, helicopters, nuclear subs, thousands of rounds of ammo per soldier, all were abundantly available even as the civilians sucked up radiation searching for cans of Alpo to eat. Not realistic at all, to expect equipment and consumables to be available after all the infrastructure to supply that had disappeared. Typical American fantasy, that abundance was available through wishful thinking ( the oil will never run out! ). To think that an Industrial/Oil Age level of logistics will be available after Armageddon is as silly as thinking Al Gore has something besides fatback between his ears. Logic dictates the collapse, and Def-Con gets it pretty spot on. Perhaps even better than Road Warrior, which, although very good, did leave a few questions. Def-Con isn’t perfect, there are also questions such as how are all the serfs in the Fort fed? But overall it was one of the more realistic guesses about life after civilization. I’ve seen just about every post-apocalypse movie out there ( baring the posers that are “normal life, civilization rebuilt far after nuclear war” types which are mere disaster movies in masquerade ) and I tell you, this is one of the better ones.

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There were cannibals, the very few rich and privileged serviced by the poor masses, crazy lone retreaters defended by minefields ( he didn’t look like a certain Idahoan, but… ), death by slow radiation poisoning and malnutrition, entertainment by execution, etc. Yes, it was typical 80’s look, with typical vintage transfer to video quality, and the scenes were too dark, some of the actors were overpaid. The budget, while not bad at all for the genre, was still somewhat towards the lower end. None of that mattered, as the movie as a whole was a darn fine depiction of life after the collapse. The way the subject was covered allowed certain technical flaws to be easily overlooked. All in all, four out of four stars.

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