Staten Island is usually the butt of jokes.  I get it, Staten Island is the red rash on the bottom of Blue York City.  We were the final destination of the great white flight from Brooklyn.  We’re deeply blue-collar and red-hat.  And now, as the pandemic works its way into its third year, we’ve been the hot spot for embarrassing videos of mall-marchers and bar-busting protests about COVID quarantine.  I don’t know how this happened. Staten Island started on the right side of the pandemic.  The virus hit New York City hard.  Everyone knew someone who died.  The hospitals were overwhelmed.  As were the morgues; They were stacking bodies in refrigerator trucks like so-many fish sticks.  We saw the deaths. We saw the first responders being worked to their limits and beyond.  The sick kept coming. Only fools would deny that we had to take the pandemic seriously.

I don’t know if anyone remembers, but one of the first videos that went viral during the earliest days of the pandemic was from Staten Island.  And it was a video of angry people in a supermarket chasing a woman out of the store FOR NOT WEARING A MASK!  Yes, that was us.

Then came the fools.  And the politics. 

​Here we were, on the front lines of the plague but we were also waist-deep in Trumpism.  Once the twice-impeached, classified-document stealing, liar, fraud and FORMER NEW YORKER declared that the virus was a hoax and we could cure it with horse paste so that it would be gone by Easter because he cancelled some flights out of China, the mood in Staten Island started to shift.  Bars decided they didn’t want to be closed.  Restaurants-goers didn’t want to wear masks.  They didn’t trust the vaccines that Trump claimed credit for discovering.  It was a very confusing time.  But Staten Islanders did want they do best; blame the mayor and the governor. 

The new viral videos were now “protestors” invading food courts and declaring the pandemic over.  Their new news outlets were more than willing to support that worldview.  Masks were the new oppression and mandates their new obsession.  People literally told me they didn’t get the vaccine because (and I quote) they didn’t like “being told what to do.”  These were firefighters who are told to run into burning buildings, but the vaccine was where they drew the line.

So, in a land where traffic lights are ignored, stop signs are merely “suggestions” and turn signals are “none of your business” we can now add health mandates to the list of things that are oppressing us here in the county of COVID.

Dear Hollywood,

Look, I’m sorry “The Mummy” tanked…oh, who am I kidding, I’m not.  I was angry about it since they announced it and the start of this whole Universal Monster “Dark Universe.”  I’ve been mad about this stuff since “Van Helsing” came out.  I grew up loving the monster movies of Universal Studios.  From “Frankenstein” right up to “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein” (if you don’t know it’s one of the most solid Universal horror movies done in the Forties, I pity you), the movies were scary, funny, thrilling, and hokey.  Sure, continuity is off, this was back before “franchises” existed and each movie kinda started from scratch, but they were fun and not calculated.  Even the first time the idea of two monsters existing in the same universe occurred (“Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman”), it started off a joke idea that people grew to like.

But it was a train wreck of a movie, whose only acknowledgment of previous Universal monster movies was the vague notion that werewolves can kill vampires, which was first implied at the conclusion of “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

Anyway, the film got me angry.  So angry, I wrote the sequel to the last Universal monster movie they SHOULD HAVE done.  I brought it into modern times, I managed to explain why we haven’t heard from the monster is decades, and I folded in every bit of folklore from the movies I could PLUS give it a sense of humor about itself.  It was a tale of thrills, revenge and villainy.  Naturally, as soon as I started showing it around, Universal started floating the idea of a “Dark Universe” to compete with Marvel movies or DC.

Sure, I tried to do a rewrite, and convert the monsters into the more public domain versions of themselves, but the same reaction was had.  Apparently you can’t pitch a movie called “Island of Frankenstein” without triggering those connections.  Oh, well.  I’m very happy with it and I love the big finale.  So, I park it here, on my website.  Enjoy.