Projectile Motion

Sometime around 6:45 p.m. that Wednesday evening, I received a single-word text message: Homeless.

My fiancée Jaime had, for the better part of an hour, been picking her way south through Tuscaloosa toward the Charleston Square apartment complex, her home for the previous two years while attending the University of Alabama School of Law. I was in Montgomery awaiting word, barely breathing. For those of us uninterested in listening to the "fast busy signal," the cell networks were useless; only intermittent texts were getting through.

She had taken shelter from the afternoon storm at the law office where she was clerking. It was a last-minute decision to stay there rather than return home -- a place of at least familiar comfort if not actual security. It was not a decision she’d made easily: Her nine-year-old polydactyl calico, Audrey, was waiting back home -- a cat she and I both referred to as our "daughter" (especially when she was getting into trouble, climbing into kitchen cabinets and knocking spice bottles and coffee mugs to the floor. "Look what your daughter is doing," we would say). Jaime's apartment complex was large, squat, and made predominantly of brick. It had been there for a generation if the Swinging Sixties-era light fixtures in the hallway and bathroom were any indication. Probably very safe.

After hearing James Spann report that the tornado was "downtown," Jaime and her co-workers locked themselves in a basement stairwell to wait it out. Long minutes passed silently -- no muffled howling, no creaking foundations. Turned out the law offices were well out of harm's way; it was the busy mall district just south of the University of Alabama campus that had been erroneously referred to as "downtown." When Jaime reached an upper-story window and looked out, she glimpsed the grinding, dirty edge of the funnel cloud, a wicked superimposition over a regular afternoon.

So, she had forewarning. The only question remaining was where, exactly, the damage would be -- how close to home. Answer: Very. More than a mile from her front door, blocked roadways forced Jaime to abandon her car and hike in work shoes down 10th Avenue, every step bringing her deeper into nightmare: a small grocery store with its front knocked off revealing unharmed stocked shelves; a muttering neighbor who could not be consoled; the National Guard armory on the corner of her street appeared to have been bombed, the Humvees and canopied trucks tossed like sandbox toys. Several blocks of the Rosedale Court neighborhood were simply gone.

Satellite photos now show the path of the storm -- nearly a mile wide -- crossing directly over Charleston Square, smearing the bold outline the buildings made around the lush four-acre courtyard -- a courtyard where Jaime and I had spent much of the previous Easter weekend, soaking up the sunshine while our laundry tumbled dry, watching mockingbird chicks flit from oak tree to pine tree and back again, their new wings lightly snapping in the air, wishing management would open the pool, already.

It was Saturday, three days after the tornado, before I saw the aftermath for myself. Carrying bins of empty duffel bags, our plan was to pick through the rubble to salvage what we could. Jaime had assembled a rough list of specific clothes and mementos; larger items and furniture were either buried or otherwise obstructed by fallen brick, a truth we had to reluctantly tell friends offering to drive up from as far as the Gulf Coast to help us. But the main concern was finding Audrey. We were armed with a stack of flyers, good shoes, and ready voices; I was prepared to upturn stones and call that cat's name for hours, didn't care how goofy I would look, how hoarse I would get, didn't care who I annoyed.

Jaime, of course, had already looked. She looked that Wednesday night, arriving ninety or so minutes after the horror struck, so shell shocked she couldn't see that the roof had been ripped from the entire building, not just above her own unit, where the living room yawned into the sky. She looked again on Thursday morning as Sealy maintenance persons shouted at her to get out of the wreckage, consoling herself by collecting as much fiberglass-infused clothing as she could before surrendering to the long car ride south to Montgomery, to me. "I managed to get a bunch of stuff," she said over the phone. My heart didn't break so much as collapse when I opened the hatch of her Focus to see only one small suitcase, one half-empty basket of dirty clothes, and some random waterlogged cardboard sheets from photo albums obviously blown apart, collected by the co-worker who had accompanied her that morning, who had known better than Jaime, in that moment, what might later be more important than some few handfuls of clothes. Because Jaime had nothing to unpack, we sat down on my living room floor and began peeling the photo-album pages apart, futilely trying to wipe the pictures clean of tornado grime. Because there was nothing to say, we said nothing.

Audrey was an inside cat, venturing out only on a harness, and even then usually just to hide in a nearby bush and thump her tail at birds. But she and I had begun making a morning ritual of "going for a sniff." I'd scoop her up against my shoulder, open the front door, and step out. Audrey would crane her neck, rotate her head this way and that, sniffing so hard it was more like snorting. Until some motion or noise would spook her, that is. Then she'd twist, piston her back feet off my chest, and project herself several feet into the living room.

It was exactly this survival instinct, based in happy cowardice, that gave me faith Audrey had ridden the storm out safely. How many times, on clear quiet days, had she gotten low and scooted down the hall to cover? She quite possibly heard the tornado form, miles away, sharp as her ears were; by the time it finished chewing Rosedale, she was probably not just under the bed, but inside. (Literally. Thanks to a convenient rip in the bottom fabric, Audrey had begun making the box spring her private clubhouse -- particularly when she sensed it was time to travel in her loathed pet carrier.) She would wait out the storm there, terrified but safe, hearing the wind test, then peel back, then eventually take the roof to scattered points to the north-northeast; the exterior brick wall collapsing into the living room, crushing all the furniture; the refrigerator banging from one side of the kitchen to the other while the windows exploded, while the trees were mangled bare, while mud flew like shrapnel, while cars were pummeled with heavy debris until the parking lot became a junkyard, while one section of an adjoining building collapsed into splinters, while the neighborhoods to all sides were blown, shrieking, into elemental pieces.

Audrey probably waited until all of this was over, until it was relatively quiet. Perhaps as long as an hour. Then, she went for a sniff. I imagined her, confused but alert, picking her way over the bricks, those extra toes splayed for traction, nose lifting as she embarked on an adventurous, unlimited sniff. I repeated this, as time crawled past, like a Zen mantra to myself and to Jaime: Audrey is fine. She's on a walk. We'll find her. At times, I could believe -- particularly when I knew Jaime, more than anything, needed to believe. At other times, usually while sleeplessly beached on the edge of the bed, it was a wish made on someone else's birthday cake.

Saturday we rose early, eager for the quest. We'd spent the previous day trying to relax, regroup -- venturing to the dry cleaners, to Saigon Deli for lunch, to the grocery store -- but it didn't work. We obsessed over news tidbits as they rolled in; Jaime found a terrifying account from her now-former next-door neighbors, who described the sound of the tornado as "nails on a chalkboard" and afterwards discovered a young woman dying outside the building. If I'd been there, Jaime would start, and never finish. We held each other, talked each other up, talked each other down, best we could. Jaime rationalized losing ninety-nine percent of everything she owned by calling it all "stuff we don't have to worry about moving out of Tuscaloosa, now." Because we couldn't process everything that had happened, and was still happening to so many people, we worried and grieved over the one small thing we could: our cat. By 5 p.m. on Friday, we'd tag-team called every vet office and shelter in northwest Alabama, leaving messages describing Audrey. Polydactyl calico, mostly black with gold flecks, yellow-green eyes, big white spot on her chest, little white toes, we love her very much.

By Saturday morning I was desperate and wired as Yosemite Sam, ready to hit the road at the first hint of light. The Jeep was packed with Hefty bags of my old clothes for donation; we had a long list of what to salvage and a rough plan for Audrey’s search-and-rescue operation, our ultimate purpose. But a renegade tree root beneath the foundations of my Montgomery apartment had other ideas. I had the car keys in my hand when the bathtub began to gurgle, gallon after gallon of dirty water belching upwards into the tub. (Had I been in possession of a Yosemite Sam mustache, the curled ends would surely have steamed themselves straight.) Our departure was delayed for nearly an hour while the superintendent was called, plumbers summoned, the bathtub bleached clean -- Mother Nature conspiring against us at every turn, or so it felt.

I've prepared for, witnessed, lived through, and cleaned up after hurricanes of Category 3 and Category 4 strength -- forces of nature large enough to shift coastlines. I've never seen anything like the destruction brought by the tornado that hit Tuscaloosa three days after Easter Sunday in 2011. You could say the devastation was wall-to-wall, but there were few walls left by which to judge. Words fail in the same way as when trying to describe the Grand Canyon to someone who has never seen a single square inch of the American West. Resorting to clichés like "war zone" or "movie set" only underlines the surreality of how quickly a familiar landscape can be turned inside out to reveal a kind of Shadow Hell you never knew was ever there.

Hurricane damage, by measure of contrast, is spread out -- diffused, if you like. Tornado damage is condensed, alarmingly specific, almost personal. In Tuscaloosa, I experienced it like a jump cut in a film: One moment I was walking up 10th Avenue, toward 27th; the next, I was surrounded by relentless destruction, a transition as sudden and heartless as if I'd dropped down a sixty-foot hole. Familiar landmarks had disappeared. I stopped short for a moment, transformed into a common rubbernecker, while Jaime took several strides ahead of me, handing flyers to volunteers stationed to pass out water and food to those who needed it. "Have you seen a cat? Has anyone seen a cat?"

"Yeah, I saw a cat over there," said a young boy, pointing to some half-gone house with rubble piled at all sides. What a fool's errand we had embarked upon: one skittish cat in a tornado. Three days had passed. We might as well have been wading a river in search of one particular fish.

We continued up to Charleston Square, passing the wrecked armory next door. Jaime's complex looked indistinguishable from it, or from any other debris pile in the vicinity. We stepped across the girded iron fencing, flattened as if by bulldozer, which had surrounded the grounds. My first impression was that fire, not wind, had been the factor of destruction, so thick were the building's outer walls coated with black dust and tornado filth. A car in the parking lot had been lifted up, then slammed back down atop a footlocker-sized beer cooler. A roofing beam jutted from the windshield of a nearby truck as though someone had used it in an attempt to pole-vault away from the damage. A quarter of the front building on the far right side had collapsed completely, granting a previously unavailable view of the courtyard and the interior side of Jaime's building, or what was left of it. All the second-story apartments were as roofless as ancient ruins, fronted by redbrick rubble, a drywall version of Jericho.

Jaime approached a cluster of Sealy personnel, flyers outstretched. We'd been in Tuscaloosa all of fifteen minutes. "They just found a cat, go look over there," a maintenance worker pointed toward a second group of Sealy personnel stationed at tables arranged near what was left of the gated entrance, now an impromptu check-in point for residents coming to scavenge their former homes. On a table off to one side, sheltered by a particolored beach umbrella, sat a small laundry basket covered with a sheet.

Audrey.

A half-hour earlier, maintenance had conducted a sweep of the buildings, still looking for people. They found Audrey under a bed in unit #95, downstairs and across from Jaime's apartment, #122. Nervous, understandably thirsty, a little grumpy about being cramped down in the bottom of the basket (she's a large cat), but otherwise not a scratch on her -- just some nugget of paste stuck to her fur, easily snipped away later on. They had situated her beneath the umbrella just moments prior, not long after we parked and started walking up 10th Avenue. Meaning: The root-clogged plumbing lines of my own apartment had not delayed us at all. We were right on time.

Forty-eight hours prior to finding Audrey, as we sorted through what few clothes Jaime had salvaged, she extracted a foreign torn scrap of paper from within one of her blouses. It is a printed fragment, crumpled and flyspecked with mud, from someone's science-class Powerpoint presentation. It is headed PROJECTILE MOTION. Below that are two lines: An object may move in both the X and Y directions simultaneously. The form of two-dimensional motion we will deal with is called projectile motion. In other words, what goes up will come back down. What leaves you will find its way home.

The scary mystery of what Audrey must have seen and heard just after the tornado and in the long days and nights that followed only deepens for Jaime and me as we learn more about what happened to others. It does not escape us that, compared to many, Jaime (like Audrey) emerged visibly unscathed. It is an inconvenience, and a massive one, to lose everything but what's on your back -- including much that will not have a replacement awaiting purchase on some store shelf and cannot be covered by any amount of insurance. But, in the end, even these are only things. Many in Tuscaloosa and across the South lost far more than some physical objects, however treasured. Treasures can be fondly remembered as we work to forget the trauma; the long road towards healing begins with the rubble around us.

Though she can't voice her adventures, it's clear Audrey can show us the way. Jaime's mother works at a veterinarian's office near Huntsville and cautioned us to watch our daughter, monitor her behavior; she was certain to be affected by her experiences. But soon after arriving back in Montgomery, after eating her fill and submitting to as many bellyrubs as Jaime and I could dish out, Audrey was back to her usual cat business, jumping onto the refrigerator and getting inside the kitchen cabinets. Let her break all the mugs she wants, I told Jaime. We'll buy more. Because the important thing is: We're home.

On April 23 2012, the Oxford American republished "Projectile Motion" as an online original.

Poems Jeanne Leiby Was Glad to Know

This post was part of the "Poems I'm Glad to Know" series the Southern Review Lagniappe blog featured for National Poetry Month 2011; it originally appeared there on 4/19/2011. I am reposting it out of the utmost respect. Godspeed to you, Jeanne. It will always be the poets.

POEMS I'M GLAD I KNOW (Jeanne Leiby's 2011 National Poetry Month Picks)

Not only was it difficult to pick only five poems, it was extremely difficult to pick single pieces by poets whose work I have loved for so long. Nevertheless, here are five poems that have shaped me as a writer and reader:

"What Work Is" by Philip Levine (This poem -- above all else and every other piece of writing I’ve ever read -- has had the biggest impact on me. It taught me there is poetry in the industrial landscape of my native Detroit and its suburbs. No lesson has been more significant to me as a writer.)

"Poetry" by Marianne Moore. (I remember reading this poem in my introduction to poetry workshop at UMich, a course taught by the great writer Richard Tillinghast. It was eye opening to discover poetry can have wit and humor. The phrase "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" still hangs above my home computer.)

"In the Waiting Room" by Elizabeth Bishop (although it was really hard to choose between "In the Waiting Room" and "Filling Station" and let us not forget "The Man-moth." Okay, yes, this is three poems instead of one.)

"1st September, 1939" by W. H. Auden (I was introduced to this poem via the play The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer. Just after graduating from college, I moved to London. It was the first West End play I ever saw, and the production starred Tom Hulce who was just off his Academy-award winning performance in Amadeus. It was the first time I experienced -- and internalized -- the interaction between poetry and performance.)

"View With a Grain of Sand" by Wislawa Szymborska. (I love the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, and if I ever get to publish her, I will be a happy editor.)

-- Jeanne Leiby, 1964-2011

Under the Dome (2009)

The gist of Stephen King's latest novel is succinctly described by the title itself and expounded upon by the wraparound jacket art, which contains no description whatsoever, not even a blurb or author photo. The image of a New England tourist 'burb trapped beneath a translucent dome -- a crashed airplane near one side, a small dog looking plaintively out another, a church on fire in the distance -- does the job of several thousand words. Such is the situation for the long-bestselling Mr. King that his books, however small or large, now need no introduction.

Under the Dome begins with the eponymous Dome descending from Space Unknown (to the great misfortune of a foraging woodchuck) and ends with it silently rising back into the sky. Who put it there and why are not the primary concerns of the story, and those reading only for those puzzles will come away disappointed; the Dome is transparently (pun intended) a deus ex machina meant to showcase conflict. It serves the same purpose as George Romero's shambling legions of dead folk: why they're there is not nearly so important as how people handle the crisis.

To this end, the town of Chester's Mill, Maine (neighboring the familiar King-doms of Castle Rock, Derry, and TR-90), fragments in a relative hurry with big assistance from a blustery town selectman and used car salesmen, name of Big Jim Rennie, who is more inclined to political machination than community organization. That semi-thankless job will fall to decorated Iraq War veteran-turned-short order cook Dale Barbara, on the run from his past but not running fast enough to escape either the judgment of the Dome or Rennie's attempts to keep him from usurping power, even when Barbara is deputized by the President himself.

As the case would be, of chief concern to the Outside World is getting the citizens of Chester's Mill liberated; on the inside, it's simple survival of the fittest. And those vying for their survival are divided into two camps: the Good and the Bad. Rennie, turns out, is very, very bad (think Captain Ahab as Mayor of Mayberry). His ultimate motivation is not the welfare of the citizens but the stowage of his own secret: an outskirts-of-town meth factory so large it supplies most of New England with product. Barbara just wants to leave town, already, but his sense of duty -- spurred by Julia Shumway, owner of the town newspaper -- will prevail. In the meanwhile there are intrigues a-plenty, from a serial killer preying on the trapped victims to the town's children having eerie, identical nightmares about falling pink stars. This being a Stephen King novel, not everyone will come to a happy ending.

Despite the book's size, this is not an epic in the usual sense -- just a thriller-diller with a surplus of moving parts (in fact, it often seems strangely and decidedly non-epic, such is King’s prowess with storytelling intimacy). Given the plethora, there are inevitable weak spots: too many stock characters (several named alike); too much obvious, melodramatic Law and Order-esque dialogue; too damn many pages, et cetera. But frankly, King gets raked over for variations of these sorts of things, all the time, anyway. It misses the point. Which is this: King, like Dumas and Shakespeare before him, is writing for a popular audience, one looking for meaty entertainment, not necessarily literary showmanship (more on that in a moment).

King delivers the beef, even manages to sneak in a broad lesson or two. He has explicitly stated how Under the Dome is "about [our] serious ecological problems. We have this little blue world, and it appears like that's about all there is. We haven't seen evidence of anyone else. We're on our own, and we have to deal with it. All of us." That ideology doesn't come into play until the novel's final hundred pages; more to the forefront is a commentary on the current divisionary tactics in American politics. Rennie often comes across like a porcine first cousin to Rush Limbaugh, reaching around the obvious truth to grasp the ideas necessary to serve his own purposes. While Rennie is a good description of the kind of misled idiots who sometimes end up, by hook or by crook, in power in small tourist towns, this is King's thinly veiled criticism of the Bush administration and how it handled crisis, right down to the two airplanes that strike the sides of the (Super) Dome.

To serve this end, the characterizations are suitably stark and static. This creates a dearth of surface friction but King is working in absolutes, Survival vs. Death. The reader is presented a type of morality play old as time and moving at breakneck speed, King’s favorite gear, housed in a dressed-up "disaster" template like Towering Inferno or Airport. The isolation and dread he describes will be solidly familiar to anyone who has ever had to deal with crippling coastal storms: King perfectly evokes the outside-of-time atmosphere which settles over an area in the path of a hurricane or nor'easter. During such emergencies, shades of gray only muddy the palette.

At a time when genre fiction is finally getting its due -- Lovecraft and Chandler and Philip K. Dick are all published by the prestigious Library of America; Pulitzer-Prize winning Michael Chabon is embracing comic book and crime noir narratives -- our most popular author of potboilers is getting bolder in his experimentation, seemingly shrugging off his old, self-applied critique that his work is the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. There are burger meals which transcend drive-thru fare, as Umberto Eco will tell you. King's last couple short story collections include flat-out literary exercises, such as the excellent "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" (which appeared in The New Yorker), alongside the expected horrors. Under the Dome is spiced with sweeping, omniscient overviews ("Thanks to the magic of narration..." begins one) which break away to showcase the citizens of Chester's Mill, their reactions to the crisis, their precious foibles, their logical fears; these little tableaus would not be out of place in Winesburg, Ohio or A Lesson Before Dying. And, let's face it, there's more than one latter-day Pulitzer winner, rich with language but nevertheless sorely underdone in terms of plot, who could benefit from a little time sizzling on King’s barbeque grill, or at least steaming in his pressure cooker. Kiss the cook and pass the fries.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, April 04 2010

Cave Dwellers (1984)

Some old wizard name of Akronos has discovered how to split the atom, but an evil army is coming to take that technology from him in order to conquer the world. The cowardly wizard could use this "Geometric Nucleus" to defend himself, but noooo -- he dispatches his daughter Mila to go find the warrior Ator (Miles O'Keeffe), his former student. Cue the trials and tribulations involved in getting there, not the least of which are sunglasses-wearing evil soldiers who take Akronos hostage. Once roused from his hammock, Ator pulls a hang-glider from his back pocket and commences tossing bombs on the invaders surrounding the castle. Don't think about where the bombs came from, don't think about where the bombs came from.... Incomprehensible Italian sword-and-sorcery mess cut from the fabric of Conan's loincloth, this is a sequel to a 1982 movie, Ator L'invincibile, mercifully not in circulation. Fodder for one of the better Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. Watch this only if you miss your saving throw vs. crap.

Pod People (1983)

A hunter stumbles into a womb-like cave containing a clutch of alien eggs, which he destroys without a second thought -- doing little for the attitude of the mother, who proceeds upon a tri-state killing spree to avenge the loss of her offspring. All but one, that is -- discovered by young Tommy, who takes the egg home, where it hatches into a baby Philly Phanatic that Tommy dubs "Trumpy." Trumpy hoovers peanuts and popcorn by the bucket before developing a taste for hamsters. Meanwhile, the mother alien slaughters a rock band practicing nearby, just like Grendel does to the partying Danes in John Gardner's eponymous novel -- see, Grendel is metaphor for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, so all the loud partying and singing drive it nuts, and it slays everybody just to shut them up, what with their self-limiting structures of conscious communication gumming up the works anyway. Like Grendel, the mama alien is eventually killed by somebody or other, but not before she thins out the human population, and Trumpy escapes into the woods to provide for the possibility of a sequel. Bizarro spaghetti-SF-schlock combination of E.T. the Extraterrestrial (which director Juan Simon is explicitly ripping off) and Dumbo (which he is not).

More (1969)

Stefan is a mathematics student on self-imposed sabbatical. In Paris he commits a little burglary to raise cash, then heads south to Ibiza to commence a doomed love affair with Estelle. Warnings from friends fall on deaf ears, but soon enough Stefan learns the truth: Estelle is a heroin addict. [insert: organ stinger, 3 seconds] She promises to stop using, but her late-night dalliances with Wolf, the local supplier, continue. Stefan moves them to a villa on the other side of the island where they smoke hashish and take LSD and enjoy the blisteringly refracted sunlight because it's the 1960s, maaaaaan. Guess what: the cure doesn't take, and Estelle is back on the same horse she was riding before she fell off and it trampled her, or whatever. People in this movie are always saying things like "Groovy man, let's get high..." and that's when the dialog is comprehensible at all. If people had conversations like the conversations had in this film, we'd all be on drugs just to cope. Supposedly now a cult classic in Europe, on the order of Easy Rider (1969) in the US. The first of three films for which Pink Floyd provided the soundtrack, which is about the only thing More has to recommend it to modern audiences. And that's not much. So, how about a little less, please?

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

Texarkana filmmaker Charles Pierce's first project was a low-budget "documentary" about the Fouke Monster, a Bigfoot-esque creature roaming the bottomlands and swamps of the Texas/Arkansas border. The film collects various accounts of encounters with the creature, local legends and campfire tales tied together by a folksy narrator recounting how the creature scared him as a child and wondering if the thing is still lurking in the woods. Local citizens and landowners spin yarns of spotting the monster while on squirrel hunts and driving at night on lonely roads; at one point, a hunt is organized but once the dogs catch a whiff of the hideous thing, they go no farther. The centerpieces of the film are two disturbing scenes involving late-night attacks, one on a trailer where three teenage girls have a slumber party, the other on an isolated farmhouse rented by two young couples; the latter attack is a recreation of a newspaper account, but both occurrences too closely resemble archetypal "damsel in distress" horror-movie scenarios to carry much credibility. Hoax or not? One old salty codger, living for decades in a shack deep in the swamp, claims he's never seen any such creature. What is beyond dispute: despite the extraordinarily low budget (the movie was filmed on a borrowed 16mm camera, and it shows), or perhaps because of it, Boggy Creek is very effective at delivering some low-grade thrills. Pierce -- savvy to catch the Bigfoot craze in full swing, not long after the release of the infamous Patterson Film -- lovingly showcased the eerie shadows and sounds of the remote swamps in such a way that, sure, a shaggy 8-foot-tall monster seems plausible. And the fleeting glimpses of the creature, never fully revealed and often only heard, are just right. A huge hit at the drive-in theaters of the era, this was an undeniable influence on later films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999).

Reefer Madness (1936)

Filmed as Tell Your Children by a church coalition -- intended as an educational treatise on the dangers of drug use, concerned/easily frightened parents the target audience -- the footage was re-edited by savvy investors and the retitled Reefer Madness became an underground classic on college campuses and the midnight movie circuit during the 1970s. A bizarre pastiche of blatant misinformation, clunky scripting, and campy overacting; no plot, just thinly connected vignettes detailing the criminal hi-jinks "marihuana" inspires among fiendish "hop-heads," including but not limited to: unmarried cohabitation, misadventure by automobile, rape, suicide, murder, and (shudder) jitterbugging. Scandal! At least the drug dealers, in their snappy suits and fedoras, look respectable. Why, you'd never know the evil at your doorstep, dressed up all fancy, just like the Devil himself is apt to be.... The 'Rifftrax' edition from Legend Films includes commentary from Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)

In a distant quadrant of space, an ongoing war between humans and Cylons --sentient, human-like cybernetic creatures -- enters its endgame following a sneak nuclear attack on human outposts (the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and primary planet Caprica), which are thoroughly destroyed. A handful of survivors escape by taking to whatever ships are nearby. This cobbled fleet falls under the stewardship of the only remaining warship, the Battlestar Galactica, and its beleaguered commander, Admiral Adama. Newly-elected President Laura Roslin, battling cancer and susceptible to drug-induced visions, instructs the skeptical Adama to chart a course for the legendary lost Thirteenth Colony (Planet Earth, duh) guided only by religious artifacts and vague prophesy derived from ancient polytheistic scriptures. Adama is grumpy about it, but follows orders, understanding that people need a more constructive, positive goal than merely maintaining their desperate flight from the relentless Cylons. They need to find a new home.

The mortal plight of these 50,000-odd remaining human beings is counterbalanced by the schemes and needs of the Cylons. They are a race eons old; twelve clone "models" of Cylon are known to exist, but only seven have been identified. The "Final Five" models have critical internal, subconscious knowledge of their racial genesis, but are scattered among the remaining human population, their memories erased and masked by new identities. To fulfill their destiny and forward their monotheistic system of religion/prophesy, the Cylons want to reunite with the Final Five, find their own way to Earth, and establish a permanent home world. But the "Significant Seven" are themselves divided about how to proceed: do they simply destroy the remaining humans (so the Final Five will then "download" into new clone bodies on their Resurrection Hub)? Or do they use, even team with, the humans to collectively find Earth and, eventually, peace? Even their primary pawn, human scientist Gaius Baltar, can't keep their machinations in order -- not that he tries much, being so sidetracked by his lust for Cylon Model #6 he can no longer tell reality from dream. A condition that may very well define the end (or is it the beginning?) of the Human Race....

War and Peace set in outer space; a serious SF drama about war, politics, culture, race, and the miraculous, unknowable nature of God. Showrunners David Eick and Ronald Moore remain philosophically pliable throughout, challenging viewers to pick a side, then painting the Cylons the same shade of Human as all the other human characters. Much that the 1970s-era show took for granted, this version cultivates and explores, building a world that supports two conflicting religions, neither of which can survive direct confrontation. This became problematic when it came to scripting an ending for the series, but the great strength of the overall Galactica narrative is in the questions it raises, less so the answers provided. Joss Whedon: "It's so passionate, textured, complex, subversive, and challenging that it dwarfs everything on TV."

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Detective Sam Spade is hired by va-voom redhead Brigid O'Shaughnessy to find her sister ... only she doesn't have a sister, and people connected to the case keep winding up dead: a cargo ship's captain, a guy named Thursby, even Spade's business partner Archer. What's an amoral PI to do? Get to the bottom of it, of course, and in this case what everybody's chasing is a jewel-encrusted statuette of a black bird, paid in retribution by the Knights Templar to the King of Spain. Hooey, maybe -- but the bodies keep stacking up, so keeps Spade shifting allegiances in order to remain one step ahead of the law. John Huston's enduring take on Dashiell Hammett's quintessential grifter tale is still a hoot after eight decades. Humphrey Bogart is to Sam Spade what Boris Karloff is to Frankenstein's Monster. Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet turn in equally iconic performances as villains each looking to catch the mysterious Falcon for themselves. The penultimate scene, as the principals conspire to get their story straight for the authorities (and to hell with whatever really happened) is the greatest send-up of cozy butler-did-it mysteries ever concocted -- takes place in a parlor, even. Play it again, Sam.

Slither (2006)

Small-town lawman Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion, having a blast) is charged with protecting the province of Wheelsy just as a meteor lands and a space bug with a mission -- a reproductive mission -- hatches. Freakin' alien terrorist cells, I tell you what. The critter isn't choosy for a mate, picking the first target of opportunity, happens to be town boss Grant Grant, out in the woods with his mistress Brenda since his wife back home (the lovely Starla, who also happens to be Pardy's old unrequited love) won't give him any, boo hoo. Take a pinch of Alien (1979), a dash of Die Monster Die (1965), garnish liberally with some From Beyond (1986), next thing you know Grant has mutated into a giant space slug and taken up stealing raw meat so he can feed Brenda, whom he's tucked away in an abandoned barn while she... gestates. Not to give it away, an unholy rain of brain-eating space slugs ensues. Something for everyone. Lovecraftian homage to creature features of yore; James Gunn's witty script and direction target the funny bone as much as the gross-out gizzard. This is how a dud becomes an underground cult classic.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (1997)

Errol Morris documentary focuses on four oddballs: a sculptor of topiary hedges, a lion tamer, an engineer who builds insect-like robots, and the world's foremost expert on the mole rat. Morris crosscuts footage of his subjects weighing in on what their obsessions mean to them with bizarre stock footage from old newsreels, educational films, and cartoons, then layers dialogue from one subject over visual footage of another -- disorienting techniques that deliver unusual punctuation, and uncover common ground between these disparate men and their works. What first seems a kooky conceit gone wrong slowly gels into a deeper meditation about how our passions shape our lives. Sublime, weird, hilarious, moving.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Reliably inaccurate psychic Criswell clears his throat and warns audiences of "grave robbers from outer space" (the film's working title) as this Z-grade masterpiece from Ed Wood kicks off. Airline pilots report flying aluminum foil pie-tins wobbling through the California skies. Innocent gravediggers are brutally attacked by thin-waisted creature-feature movie host Vampira. At some point, police inspector Tor Johnson becomes a zombie (plot twist: no one can tell the difference). Bela Legosi dies in real life, does not become a zombie, is replaced by the director's chiropractor (plot twist: everyone can tell the difference). Cops scratch their foreheads with their revolvers and stumble over cardboard tombstones while muttering dialogue so inept, it doubles back to a Zen-like grace: "It's tough to find something when you don't know what you're looking for." Fey aliens wrestle with cheap prop curtains and cross their arms in salute just before their own zombies choke them to death. Smart viewers seek solace in illicit medication. A classic of its kind, as the kids say.