One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Read online

  REVIEWS

  ★★★★★

  Baby Alive sucks you in and never lets you go. If you want action with raw emotion and the added bonus of REAL people that lends an air of ambiguity this movie will intrigue and inspire.

  ★★★★

  I saw this movie in pre-release and found disjointed the attempt to merge so-called “reality” with actual celebrity within the same medium. Still, the plot itself is both familiar and functional, structured as a series of vignettes (or “episodes”) in which we meet each teen mother before, during, or after her pregnancy, such that, prior to each grisly demise, earlier mothers are making the decision to have unprotected sex with their boyfriends (or sometimes acquaintances or assailants), and later scenes show the young ladies increasingly pregnant, and so on. Thereby an interesting effect occurs with respect to time, which I could get into further though not in this format. Some of the most affecting portrayals are actually the minor characters—the teen’s family members, friends, and so on—who subtly look askance at the proceedings, and are in various ways positioned by force or happenstance to observe, as well, the killings, but then disappear from the film, not to get too deep, but perhaps like life itself? In any case, the actors who play these minor characters are sometimes diamonds in the rough. Overall, the film merits a 3.5, but as that option is not available I give it 4 with the benefit of the doubt.

  ★★★★★

  The movie, enjoyable as it was, left me with many lingering questions. It doesn’t say what he wants with the babies, even though there are only a few just near the end. I know that some of the fathers we’re suppose to think are good father figures so maybe the babies left over go with him but maybe there’s a sequel about the real dads? I found that aspect confusing. Otherwise this movie is good, and I was engaged as to the internal lives at hand. I know characters curse a lot in real life, but I also feel that you didn’t need to have that many curse words to make your point.

  ★★★★★

  Go Catelynn! I knew her in high school and she was never all that but you gotta respect she made more of her life than I did ha!

  ★★★

  How did they get Sissy Spacek to do this movie? Sissy Spacek of Coal Miner’s Daughter and Carrie and Badlands!? She is a class act, she must be having money problems? I saw her last year at a farmer’s market in Virginia buying a bottle of olive oil for like twenty bucks so I don’t get it at all. I liked the movie though, it was worth the price of a ticket.

  ★★★★

  I am very selective when it comes to giving a five-star rating but this movie was awesome and it would have got five stars except for there was a little repetition in the methods the killer used—I know serial killers have to do it the same way because they are compelled, but I also feel like swords are a little overdone and the director could of mixed it up a bit more. Other than that it was fantastic viewing. John Stamos as the son/villain lends an air of brooding sophistication to the young cast.

  ★

  This movie arrived cracked and when you kindly replaced it with another one I was unable to turn off the dubbing which was Chinese or something, making for an infuriating experience. You should have a way to rate it zero stars.

  ★★★★

  Besides being a genuine suspenseful this film has many Themes and issues that it portrays. I enjoyed the symbol of the pacifier, or “nubbin” as it pertained to the serial killing/cutting body parts off aspect of the film. In terms of society at large, many of us have felt this way, and it lends a sense of reality to the relatable nature within the main character. There are some good comebacks in it and surprise twists. When I go to the movies I don’t need it to be Academy Award Worthy however you should at least know how to act so I have to admit some of the teen moms did seem scared. I was also appreciative of the production value, which is one thing that always kept me from enjoying the television version and Reality TV in general.

  ★★★

  Perhaps this movie was meant to be a satire, but someone in marketing didn’t think that would sell? I heard that the original trailer featured the classic song “Baby’s Got Back” which is hysterical, but someone nixed it or got offended which is why they switched to serious.

  ★

  I had that doll as a kid and was expecting a movie inspired by it, but if that’s the case for you, you will be surely disappointed in this travesty of a film production. What we really want is to be entertained, instead you get something totally unexpected. You may remember Baby Alive as big compared to the usual dolls and pretty realistic. It came with a baby food assemblage and poop. You know Transformers is from toys right? I bet half of you don’t even know, you just want to bang Megan Fox who doesn’t. It’s one thing for an artist to be inspired but it’s another thing to rip something off and not even know it. I know it’s geeky but I got a lot of education about life from that doll.

  ★★★★★

  This film seems like it’s all about the gore of the killer, but in the end it does have an uplifting message about the value of each and every child. I’m not saying it’s the greatest movie ever, but I and my date both enjoyed it.

  ★★★

  I am a teen mom and my own mother was murdered when my child was two months old. I’m sorry if that is TMI but only recently have I decided to try to watch movies because it’s hard to find one that isn’t triggering. So I think people should consider that. I saw this movie in the theater which was the first time I had been in a movie theater in I don’t know how long. It was in a falling apart old-school one downtown that is practically out of business but keeps hanging on. I don’t remember much about the movie all I can say is I was glad I went, it was a big step for me in my life. Maybe someday I will be desensitized enough for a fuller appreciation.

  ★★★★

  First off this movie is not about the Baby Alive doll, it’s about twelve reality star teen moms that SPOILER ALERT get knocked off one by one in the grand tradition of this type of movie, where the black guy either died first or by the end of the 80s he died second to last by saving everyone by selfless sacrificing his life, underlining a mirror of racism. The moms are actually pretty inspiring when you consider how hard it is to raise a baby in this day and age. I kind of knew about halfway who the killer is, but I’ve seen a lot of movies like this and usually I know by the end of the credits so that’s pretty good. There is also, for your information, a mechanical french duck from steampunk times that I saw in a museum that does the same thing as the doll with digesting etc. There’s also a poem.

  ★★★★★

  I remember that doll my friend had it! Gross! Also the teen moms need to get a life! But now they’re dead!

  RECALL

  Not long after the mad cows they started recalling pistachios. Pistachios: the green flesh and flaking shells of our youth. So many things had been recalled. Hybrid production accelerated until even hybrids are being recalled. People gathered in fields to remember the food that fed them and killed them. They sang of the salads, the fruits, and the meats.

  WITCHES

  Three girls, maybe eight each, lean over a pothole of water, stirring with sticks. It’s hard to tell, because they’re frozen, although it’s summer. They’re looking into the water together, with their sticks. Dim oils sketch the surface like lines from skating. One girl, the one in the middle, from this angle anyway, has a piece of grass between her teeth, and she’s grimacing. The end of the blade has fluffy seeds, and normally it’d be bobbing in the breeze. In this apocalypse, the air, it seems, can move, though nothing in it can. Where do you draw the line? Even seeds that could drift like smoke stick, no logic in it. Especially with pages accumulating, time continuing to pass. The girl on the supposed left is turning to dust as we speak, but invisibly, like a figure made of icing going stale, touch her and poof.

  I know what they were doing. The girls were playing “three witches.” They were making magic. They were poking their stew. They kept meaning to ge
t on with their game. They’d planned to capture someone, and they’d planned to turn a bunch of things into other things. But after a while the entire plot had been taken over by recipes for potions.

  ORPHAN IN THE CARDS

  It’s the future, in the morning sun, and there are more orphans than ever. A plane crashed in the background, in October. Spiderwebs covered the field in a sheen like water, sparks like the jewels of yore.

  At the edge of the field she felt like a bell in her coat. The shadows of a flock of birds spun on the ground like a blizzard. The shadow of the flock of birds moved from the shape of a spade to the shape of a club. She’d always felt great at a buffet, and a buffet is like history because you can pick. She remembered her mother, the way she’d look up. She remembered her father, like spilled milk. She might have chosen another card. She might have picked up on another song. “What’s that beautiful song?” she’d asked eons ago, and it was arpeggios, the stuff of life.

  She was about to live out the rest of her days. She was looking into all three options, eyes in her head, eyes in the back of her head, two eyes that beat as one.

  BABIES

  They were cute, but they didn’t know anything. They were full of shit babies and they kept her, when she came home from the shit in her life, from recovering, from what do you call it—healing, from learning. They didn’t know anything but they were busy, they were drawing pictures and developing their sensibilities. They were cute, and they were fun, too, they thought of such original things, and they helped her, they made her forget—wait, no, not forgetting, but feeling like she was making something, making something out of babies, even though they had no idea, they were mostly drawing pictures and coming up with shit. She thought she could keep them clean. She thought she could keep the shit outside, she thought she could take it outside, she thought she could leave it outside, but when they grew older so much shit would happen to them, as it had happened to her—they would get beat, shit would rain from the sky on them, too, what do you say about weathering vs. weathering a storm, a shitstorm. Well, in the future they weathered it, in the future she went back into the house, they were gone, she flew around in there, in the house with everything her kids made that held up the walls.

  MIRACLES

  We watched our father take the jar out to the patio on the day we had been waiting for ever since he put the spider into it with its egg sac. It was a black widow spider which we knew never to touch in the garden and to know by the red bow on its belly. We’d been living in the country since our stark raving mad mother started calling the apartment from her orbit. Our father lay down near the jar, on his side. He was always showing us stuff around the farm. He was growing a beard, always tired and patient. There was a barn with a horse in it we were taking care of. He said a lot about learning to take care of others as a part of growing up, and we watched him with eyes too big for our heads. We gathered around the jar and put our noses to it in turn, looking for the movement he said to look for in the egg sac, how you could see it was time by shadows crossing. We were getting a little bored when the babies started to come out, just like he said. They were smaller than anything, and the big mother spider, you couldn’t tell if she was paying attention. The babies were spreading out over the inside of the jar, the miracle of life. They were making their ways to the air holes punched in the lid. Our father just watched and commented for our benefit. He put a stick to an air hole and we watched babies crawl up it. Spiders crawl their whole lives. We watched, but some of our attention wandered. We were new to the countryside, new life surrounding us. I remember a lot of things from that place besides this. After the apocalypse, a brother of mine said, “Do you remember if you were nervous with all those poison spiders radiating from the jar? Do you remember that we didn’t have any insect spray because we’d just moved out there but he had a can of hairspray and that’s what he sprayed on them, just as they were getting away? Why did we have hairspray? Was it hers?”

  TIME MACHINE

  He arrived at her house on his bicycle, chained it to her porch, buckled his helmet to the rear rack, and knocked. A helmet, seriously, now he has a helmet and it’s not for hockey, not for a Ducati, it’s for a bicycle. He hadn’t wanted to drive, because he was afraid he might run over something.

  She opened the door, wearing, at four in the afternoon, men’s flannel pajamas rolled to the knees and elbows, her hair held back with a pencil, a second pencil behind her ear, and a third pencil in the pocket of the flannel top. “You,” she said, and tilted her head, which made the pencil behind the ear slip, which she caught and held in her teeth like a rose. Instantly he liked her house. He stood in the doorway, then stepped in as she stepped away and they both stood in the half-moon foyer. He tried to think of why he liked the house, and it was the smell. It didn’t smell like his house, he realized; what his house smelled like was baby, because of the baby. They had a flirty thing at work. At work she’d said, “Come over, I’ll show you my sketches.” But here she was with the pencils. She wasn’t an artist; by her own account, she was a closet writer. Still he held out hope.

  “Thank you for this,” he said in the blank space that made up the entrance. Nothing had even happened yet and he really meant it, because of the hope.

  She helped him take off his windbreaker and left to put it somewhere. He looked around the living room and then sat on the sofa. Everything was so harmless. He went to her fridge and got a soda. Harmless, rooting around her fridge. He sat back on the sofa, pushing a blanket into a lump on the other side. Harmless. She’d come over and pick up the blanket and sit where it had been and lean against the arm of the sofa with her knees up and her feet pointing at him. They’d be like two machine parts at angles on velvet outside of time. The soda was harsh and he remembered wondering as a kid how they could call it a soft drink. I’ll have a soft drink, he imagined saying with tiny “ha-ha-ha” huffs from a scene like this. What’s so funny? A scene from the ’50s in which next she’d appear in something more comfortable than men’s pajamas. What happened was he felt self-conscious. Instantly, hope was gone.

  That’s when he saw it: as if in place of hope was a structure the size of a voting booth or a Porta Potty, over near the fireplace. The structure was composed of heavy-duty plastic, cylindrical, size Adult, in midnight blue, with blue curtains. He put his soda down on the glass top of the coffee table and approached the structure cautiously. He poked the curtain. “What’re you doing?” he called, but the curtain sucked up his voice.

  He drew the curtain and stepped inside. He drew the curtain again and stood in darkness.

  The booth, if anyone asked him, he would have to say, in all earnestness, recognized him. In the dark he cycled through his senses: he felt fizzy, as if he’d been lowered into a giant body-temp version of what he’d been drinking. The lack of the smell of baby was overwhelming, mingled with the lack of the scent of his marriage, and then to top it off the lack of the scent of a woman with pencils in her hair. The inside of his mouth was still sweet. He heard faint static, and then he realized the booth was mic’d. Little colored lights were waking up all around him, even under his feet. The mic spat and then he heard the woman say through the speaker, as if shockingly near and calling anyway, “In a minute, I’m writing something down before I forget.” In the booth, more and more lights were blinking on and establishing independent rhythms. He could sort of see by them, but all there was to see were the blinking lights, the patterns of blinks and buttons in red, green, and white. It does know me, he thought. The booth began to shake a little. He didn’t know what to do. He could hop out or he could blast off, or something else that he couldn’t think of. He was so scared he took his penis out and started fooling around with it. He kept his eyes open to the cacophony of tiny lights. He hoped beyond hope that by the time he was done he’d know, by god, what would happen next.

  APOCALYPSES PAST

  After the apocalypse we didn’t even talk about all the crap we’d read about it before or
seen in movies. Like we were embarrassed of our whole species’ imagination. Even what we’d gotten right just seemed lame and obvious. It was a new taboo, talking about the predictions, uncool to do, as opposed to cannibalism, which was pretty reasonable, or wanton sex, which was necessary, heroic even, given the state of so many of our physiques. One night or day or whatever it was, we were sitting around a campfire and I was like, What do I keep trying to remember? And it was ghost stories. I mean never in real life did I ever actually tell a ghost story. I just saw it in so many movies it seemed like, having been a kid, I must have done it. Like stealing cookies from a jar, which I never did either. Who has a cookie jar? No one ever again, you can bet on it! So there we were, all fucking and eating each other by the fire, and I kept having all these apocalypse stories from my childhood right there on the tip of my tongue, but for everyone’s sake, I held back.

  TIME CAPSULES

  Forty years later, a bunch of us noticed that our elementary schools had never contacted us about digging up those time capsules. At first we saw this as another reason to have lost faith in our bodies and our homes. Then, as we wiped the sperm from each other and climbed from the wreckage of our Mini Coopers and settled into life in our yurts, we thought maybe the lesson was that no one’s keeping track except you. We thought, Maybe in our golden years. We thought, Maybe next life. Many of our elementary schools are gone, many are converted, many are 100 percent remodeled, from carpet to duct, and repopulated kid by teacher by custodial staff. Mostly only latitude and longitude is the same, and sometimes the name, usually of a person no one remembers. Our bodies have replaced all of our cells several times over, something we tripped out on together in our twenties, and still, we are what we are. Nothing is the same outside the body, and you are putting your body into stuff that is not you all day and all night with the force of your will, more and more the more you age, beaming onto the world like headlights from outer space or another epoch.