Jami's Spring Gardening, Part the third

First honeysuckle.  Have three more to transplant to the lattice fence once it gets finished.

Front yard now: crazy bale raised beds. An experiment to keep sun loving vegetables off contaminated soil.  Also in Fall the straw will help improve the soil. 

Inside (but not for long): these two hydroponic things need a deep clean.  It's really difficult to do that in the dining room so they are going to spend the summer outside growing strawberries.  I can clean then with the hose very easily.  Then in Fall they'll come back inside to grow lettuce.

Baby strawberry peeking out.

Another backyard experiment: potatoes in cloth bags.

Jami's Spring Gardening, Part 2

Along with the fig tree this is where the food growing will be. 

Old rain barrel system which I started to move but lost steam today 

Raspberries: hese were planted by squirrels all over the yard so I've been digging them up and moving  them over here.  But they are a mess and I need to figure out how to organize them.  The most ambitious sprig was transplanted from a crack in the driveway near where I park my car.

Long been a problem: between our front yard and the parking lot is half a fence.   There was more but strong winds and homeless people pushed part over.  So fed up I'm going to finish off the lattice fencing to withstand any gale force and mentally unstable person.  It requires digging fence post holes which Ive been putting off. But it has to be done soon as the ground is like cheese cake and soon, once the spring rains stop, it'll be like Adobe brick. 

Future lattice and honeysuckle vine support.  Also featured are out of control grape vines.  I need a good idea to get them some sort of pergola sort of support but haven't finalized a design yet. 

Jami's Spring Gardening, part 1

Hosta haven: nothing grew under the balcony near the house and was told hostas would love it there.  They are outrageously expensive so I wouldn't buy them but you Simon bought me a Bordines gift card last year and I used that and this year they are looking lush: beautiful all summer and completely maintenance free. And we never gets slugs so leaves look perfect.

Shitake mushroom plugs in fresh cut tree chunks.  They take a full year to get their shit together but since it's completely shaded there next to the Dollar General, we have nothing to lose by trying mushrooms.  If these work well expand to buttons and portabellos.

Raccoons did a number on the liner two years ago and I'd been putting off draining most the water, cleaning the algae off, patching (think patching bicycle innertubes), and refilling it. About three weeks ago the fish were fully recovered from winter hibernation so I set to work.  Amazingly  it worked and now the pond has a lot more surface which fish need.  Plus the birds like the shallows.

 

I found a new plant store that does only pond plants so I got some when they got their first spring load.   I got grasses as they can best withstand bad winters.  In theory they'll oxygenate the water and the gdfish (some of which are 10 years old) will be even bigger and stronger,

Our soil is almost certainly contaminated so I'm going to try raised beds.  Everyone on our street has versions of these popping up in their cars given that food has increased 500% in the past few months. Everyone is planning for the complete economic collapse of the US. 

Never liked where they were because they weren't near the things that needed water but moving them required installing guttering.  Also they are ugly green so I'm going to paint them.

Film review: The League of Gentlemen (1960)

This is a fun one, and very much of its time and place.  The time is with just one toe into the 60s but enough so there are some racy elements in this that you wouldn't see in American films until the end of the 60s.  You get a few bare breasts glimpsed on the covers of seedy magazines that one of our Gentlemen has resorted to selling (Roger Livesey, looking much older than the young Colonel Blimp, but nothing like the old Colonel Blimp (he didn't get fat or bald)) and you get overt references to shagging, homosexuality (more on which in a bit) and you get Nanette Newman (who must be considerably older than I thought) lounging in a bath 

or waiting in bed for her lover, both apparently naked, and finally Jack Hawkins calling his ex-wife "bitch".  Other than that, it's basically a down-at-heel Oceans 11, which could have turned a lot sadder than it was if it has been a bit more introspective.

So, the film begins as we see Jack Hawkins' Lieutenant-Colonel (the real rank of Nigel Patrick in WWII) Norman Hyde cutting five pound notes in half and sliding them into copies of a book called The Golden Fleece (a real American crime novel by John Boland) and addressing them.  We next see the books arrive in envelopes at an array of ex-military who are struggling to various degrees (and either love-'em-or-leave-'em types, gay, posing as clergy or in very strained married relationships).  This opening scene sketches the characters of our main players, and they remain barely sketched, albeit brought to life by a solid array of character actors.  They are: Major Peter Race (Nigel Patrick - I didn't know him, but the face seemed very familiar (and now I know why)), who is a suave ladies man woken up by his affectionate young girlfriend with the information that they'd lost a lot of money gambling, and whom we later find out lives at the YMCA) - has the habit of calling Hyde "old darling" until he snaps at him for it; Major Rupert Rutland-Smith (Terence Alexander, who apparently had a role in Bergerac later), who is the cuckolded husband of Nanette Newman (who is actually the wife of Bryan Forbes), and a sort of mirror image of the confident Race, Livesey's Captain "Padre" Mycroft, who is posing as a priest with a suitcase full of smut (those are the officer class, and all posh); Lieutenant Edward Lexy (Richard Attenborough), a working-class Lothario who fixes one-armed-bandits for crooked casino owners, whose girls he steals from them; Captain Stevens, a tall, strapping, handsome type, who works at a boxing gym and is obviously gay, although not in the least bit camp (unlike Oliver Reed of all people, who shows up in a tiny cameo as a musical theater type, mincing egregiously); Captain Frank Weaver, a hen-pecked milk-drinking (we later find out why) drab little man, living in a cramped flat with his blabbermouthed wife and her deaf father, and finally, Captain Martin Porthill (the screenwriter of this very picture, and noted director in his own right, although this one was directed by Basil Dearden, Bryan Forbes - who directed The Wrong Box and appeared in An Inspector Calls, among many others), whom we meet coming home from a party with a young woman woman, to find an older woman (in a sumptuous London house) who dotes on him but whom he treats poorly - who isn't even his wife.  He purportedly supports himself by playing piano, but really it's by leaching of rich older women.

So that's our crew, that soon assemble at the restaurant indicated on the note (in a private room).  There Hyde is very disappointed to find that some of them haven't read the book, and those who have are not gripped with fervor at the bank-robbery described therein.  He also reveals why he picked them and why they are likely to be amenable to a life of crime, because they all served well until they were dishonorably discharged.  Race ran a black-market ring, Rutland-Smith ran up huge debts, Mycroft was dismissed for public gross indecency (is he also gay?  Not clear), Lexy was a signals-whiz who sold secrets to the Russians, Porthil is a crack shot who shot the wrong people in Cyprus, Stevens is obviously the muscle (and dabbled in Mosley-brand fascism until he was caught with a man), and Weaver who is a bomb-disposal expert whose alcoholism led to the death of four of his men.

As with most heist movies, the fun of the early part of the film is the getting-the-gang together, as here, and then the middle part is the planning, and then the (almost) last part is the actual job.  Here there are actually two jobs, one of which is stealing machine guns from an Army base in Dulverton.  This is mostly comedic (Livesey poses as a very-highly ranked officer and bosses Hyde and Pace around) 

but has moments of genuine tension.  Interestingly, they all affect Irish accents while carrying it out so that the IRA will be blamed.  But then we move on to the second part, which is a bank robbery involving smoke bombs and gas masks (also stolen from the Army base).  

Maybe it's because I've seen a ton of films no doubt influenced by this one, I didn't find this particularly gripping.  (SPOILERS) nobody gets shot, and they get away with the boxes that will give each of them $100,000 each (Lexy gets fined $500 because he sneaks out to see his girl on the night before the job).  What really does for them is that they have a huge party at Hyde's fancy country house 

(where he lives alone and eats from cans, Pace finds out when he tails him after the lunch meeting, after having come across in front of the others as uninterested).  This allows the cops time to tighten the net (although we never see the cops working this out, as the police arriving outside is supposed to come as a shock) and, let's just say that money will remain unspent.  This leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth.  As Hyde said to them at the very start, the British Government spent a lot on training them with useful skills before kicking them aside, and it's a shame not to put the skills to good use.  However, one doesn't feel too sorry for our men because they clearly can't function very well outside of a total institution, and they're heading for one.

Forbes's script is nicely structured (the film is nearly 2 hours long, but never drags) and refreshingly tart.  Apart from some comments from Lexy (who has been assigned a shared room with Stevens) about "sleeping with the lights on," Stevens's homosexuality is seen as no impediment to him functioning perfectly as part of a team, making the British Army come across much better than today's US Military.  But it is interesting - we just watched a French film where murder is committed, and the culprit gets away and we're supposed to be happy (because the victim was a lech and a leech), whereas here our chaps don't even get to spend money.  Instead the good old British police force efficiently rounds them up with minimal fuss and gently herds them (and Bunny, one of Hyde's old army pals who had shown up to the party and is going to have a hard time proving his innocence) off to the nick.  Jami remarked that in an American film they would've got away with the money, but I don't think so - they would've been shot, almost certainly, starting with the gay character.

Film review: The Big Clock (1948)

I still don't know the significance of The Big Clock - really, you could have had the entire film without it, as it just features in one scene.  Maybe it was more important in the original book, and admittedly there's a speech given by the main character about how Time oppresses people, but, eh.

Anyway, this is a pretty straightforward tale, neither mystery (you see everything happen) nor noir (the good end happily, the bad are neatly disposed of without the need for intervention by law enforcement), with a fair amount of meandering around and drinking in bars.  It looked like it was going to be a noir because it began with one of those hero-in-a-tight-spot-with-"I bet you're wondering how I ended up here, right?"-voiceovers.  And this features the titular clock, which is a huge art-deco-ish one in the middle of the Janoth building, named after the very eccentric head of a publishing empire (who is obsessed with schedules, so that's why he wanted one central clock that all the other clocks in the building run off - yes, I know what you're thinking, but really he could have had some other eccentricity without it really affecting the movie).  In this bookend scene, it is late at night and our hero George Stroud (Ray Milland, who really should always play villains, as in Dial M for Murder because he has the most villainous eyes) is sneaking around the lobby avoiding a security guard.  We then cut back to "36 hours earlier," and it is morning, and Stroud is arriving to work in the same lobby.  

There's then a rather long, humorous scene of him ascending in a crowded elevator, where each floor is one of the Jaroth publications, which all end in -ways.  So, most people get off on the floor before George, which is Newsways, but he keeps ascending to Crimeways, of which he is the editor.  He is already late for a big meeting of the heads of each publication, but a call comes in to reveal that a criminal ("Fleming") they have been trying to find has been located.  The reason George is in charge of Crimeways (and was plucked from obscurity in West Virginia, of all places) is because he's an expert at finding people before the cops do (and now that can be put to good use for circulation, because Crimeways gets exclusive interviews).  He explains his method (foreshadowing!) which involves a big chalkboard whereon everything they know about the suspect is written, 

and they focus on clues that don't look like clues.  So, the current quarry has been flushed out because he's an obsessive collector of shells, and somehow they found out he was only missing one, and it could only be found in a museum in Salt Lake City, so George put a man to watch it, suspecting that their guy couldn't resist coming to steal it.  Bingo!  Well, George arrives late at the meeting, and we meet the odious Earl Janoth, played by Charles Laughton.  

There's a quote from Heath Ledger where he supposedly muttered when he was beaten out for an Oscar by Philip Seymour Hoffman for his showy portrayal of Truman Capote - "I thought it was for the best acting, not the most acting" - and Laughton's performance prompted Jami to dust that one off.  He seems to collect a set of mannerisms for each of his characters (and in this case, some truly unfortunate facial hair), and in this case they include a usually expressionless face (which twitches and contorts in moments of extreme stress), an odd, monotone, sneering delivery and a rigidly upright walk.  It's a lot, but it does effectively make you hate him.  Anyway, as I said, the main body of the film is pretty straightforward.  1. Stroud has been trying to go on "honeymoon" for seven years, because he was on it when Jorath hired him to run Crimeways because of what he'd done as a lowly scribe in West Virginia.  And every time he tries to go away (it's been a lot, as we see because his 6-year-old son refuses to pack for the trip they're supposedly about to go on because he's so used to them not happening) Jorath drags him back for some emergency.  Well not this time!  Jorath seems to regard it as a weird flex to be able to prevent his employees going on holiday, but Stroud is prepared to quit if he does.  2. Jorath has a mistress, who shows up in his office and overhears Stroud complaining about all this over the intercom.  She later hits on George in a bar/restaurant where he's waiting for his wife to celebrate the about-to-happen trip (to West Virginia!)  He doesn't respond, and his wife (played by Maureen "Jane from Tarzan" O'Sullivan, whom I got confused with Maureen "the mother from the Parent Trap" O'Hara) shows up, suspicious, and the mistress (Pauline York, played by Rita Johnson, and supposed to be a great beauty, but seems just ordinary (by actress standards) to me) scurries off, but not before letting slip what she'd heard and that they might have a common enemy.  Well, later Jorath puts his foot down and George quits (and Jorath says he'll blacklist him from every newspaper job in the country) and, instead of going home to his wife to get on the train/plane to West Virginia, agrees to meet Pauline at the same bar to get schnozzled.  This turns into a massive gripe-fest against Jorath, to the extent that he misses the train to get home and his wife jets off to WV without him.  And then, instead of trying to catch her up, he embarks on an epic bar crawl with Pauline, that involves buying a painting and picking up a weird spiky trophy-like statuette from his favorite bar, Burt's.  It ends with him passed out at Pauline's and then her shaking him awake because Jorath is about to arrive.  

He hurries out and is in the shade at the end of the hallway, about to take the stairs, when Jorath arrives by elevator.  Each stare at each other, but Jorath can't see George clearly in the shadow and doesn't know it's him.  He enters, gets into a fight with Pauline (he rants about her past lovers, she tells him everybody hates him) and, cue twitchy face, and, 3. suddenly that pointy statuette comes in handy.  Then, hilariously, he heads over to his second-in-command at the publishing empire, Steve Hagen, and announces flatly, "Steve, I just killed someone" as he asks for a cigarette.  

Steve says he'll sort everything out, and goes over to Pauline's place, finds a hankie of George's (not identified), presumably thinks it's Jorath's, messes with the clock that fell on the floor (CLOCKS AGAIN) and heads off.

By this time George has arrived at the cabin in WV (with the painting) and is patching everything up with his (frankly whiny) wife when Hagen and Jorath call.  He is willing to stay fired until it becomes clear that they're searching for somebody called Jefferson Randolph, which is the name Pauline gave for George before being clubbed to death.  Now, this name occurred to Pauline because it's a real person who hangs out at Burt's, and George thinks that Jorath wants him found because he's jealous.  So, to protect himself and Jefferson, George has to go back, causing more snit fits from the wife.  And now he has to run his usual clue-board hunt for... himself.  

This is very tricky, as you can imagine.  Meanwhile he keeps ringing Pauline to check in, but of course the phone just rings.  (It's only 2/3 of the way through that he finds out she's dead and clocks (see what I did there?) what's really going on.

Anyway, takes a bit to get going, but the last 45 minutes-ish are pretty packed.  And there are odd comedic moments.  A comical bartender, and best of all, Elsa "Bride of Frankenstein but really bride of Laughton" Lanchester shows up playing an eccentric (she seems to be competing with her husband in an eccentric-off) artist 

with a habit of ending sentences with a kind of shrieky laugh artist.  She met George because he outbid her for the painting, even though, oddly it's one of hers (and he already has others by her).  And yet she is bohemian enough to cover up for him, because she clearly has no regard for law or decorum (and has a great need for money, because she has 4 or 5 children by 3 or 4 husbands).  There's also a very young Henry-later-Harry "Colonel Potter in Mash" Morgan playing an apparently mute henchman/masseur (!) 

for Jorath, whom George has to fight (even though he's about twice Morgan's size) in the one scene inside the Big Clock.  

Also George's wife turns out to be surprisingly understanding when she comes to his workplace, sees the Big Clue Board and instantly sees that it's him.  She is very quick to forgive his carousing with a then murdered blonde, and actually tries to be useful in proving his innocence.

Anyway, not what I thought it'd be (a noir) but more of a low rent Hitchcock style innocent-man-on-the-run thing with some fine noirish cinematography, great mid century office decor and parade of eccentric character actors strutting their stuff.  A nice diversion. 

Film review: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

A lesser-known work by Jean "Grand Illusion" Renoir (who was the son of that Renoir - did you know?), this one is slight but interesting.  It takes a while to get going (at least, for me) but the last half hour canters by, and it features one of the more hateable characters you'll come across.  It's billed as a light, fluffy comedy, but what with themes of sexual abuse, murder and a stillbirth that's regarded as fortunate and swiftly recovered-from, that's a stretch, even for the French.  Apparently the script was by Jacques Prévert, who is a well-known poet in France, but whom I know only as the writer of Les Enfant du Paradis, and one can certainly see the similarities.  But it's also an overtly socialist/communist work, and Renoir said it lead to the French Communists recruiting him to make anti-fascist propaganda, which in turn put him in danger when the Nazis invaded.

Anyway, it's one of those "bookend" films, that starts with a huge car dropping off a couple at a small country inn that's "just across the dunes from the border".  They as for a room in the bar, where the man is recognized from the paper as someone wanted for murder (we get to the titular crime pretty fast, as you can see).  He collapses asleep on the bed, but as the room is right next to the bar, the woman can hear the patrons discussing whether or not they should turn him in.  She comes out and admits that he did indeed commit the murder of which he is accused, and says if, after you hear our story, you still want to turn us in, go ahead.  Cut to flashback...

The bulk of the film is in and around a newspaper/magazine publishing business.  It's not exactly highbrow, and M. Lange contributes small items, but in his spare time he writes stories about Arizona Jim (so that's where Spielberg/Lucas got the idea) and his adventures in the Wild West (a map of which he has on his wall, but of course he's never been).  He takes them to the head of the company, the loathsome Batala (a bravura performance of charming monstrous self-interest by Jules Berry, who looks sleazy), who laughs them off.  But Batala, besides shagging every woman who crosses his path, 

has also cut all kinds of deals with various businesses to start magazines that advertise their products and so forth, only to spend the money on anything but paying his downtrodden workers.  The first part of the movie (which I would probably enjoy a lot more on a re-watch) just sets up the wide array of players, from the kindly, sassy blonde Valentine, who has clawed her way up to owning a laundry (it is implied she was a lady of the street before, but she's very much a mother hen to all her girls), 

and who has history with Batala that's she's keen not to repeat, and has her eye on the shy, dreamy Lange (it is she who is telling the story), to the boastful bicycle delivery boy (who breaks his leg, to the grim satisfaction of the old soldier busibody who seems to be the super for the apartments that everyone lives in) and the girl who loves him and whom he loves, 

and whom he forgives for having Batala's bastard (only phew! it dies in childbirth), along with many others.  After doing enough to make us despise him, Batala figures that he's about to get arrested because he keeps getting visited by a persistent "inspector".  So he heads out of Paris on a train, on which he gets into a conversation with a priest, noting that nobody suspects anyone dressed like that.  Cut to news reports about the train derailing, and among the victims the publisher Batala.  (Lesser noted is the report that several passengers, including a priest, are missing.)  The creditors close in and the employees are at a loss, until Lange suggests they form a cooperative.  

This is enthusiastically supported by a new arrival, a Bertie Wooster-like scion of one of Batala's main business creditors, whose father is too ill to come, and who only seems to support the idea because he doesn't know what "cooperative" means.  It's also supported by the "inspector," whom, we discover, is a relative of Batala's who's a retired inspector and just wants a job, "a little one."  

As you can imagine, the newspaper takes off, centered round the Arizona Jim stories 

(which are already fairly popular, except that Batala kept inserting ads for various quack remedies into the text, to Lange's outrage (although that was the favorite part of the stories for the Bertie Wooster character)).  This in turn alerts the very-much-alive-and-dressed-as-a-Priest Batala, when he visits a news stand 

and is told that the stories sell like hot cakes.  He decides to return, and shows up in the offices the night of a New Years' celebration by all the employees where he is discovered by Lange, who has had an idea for the plot of the Arizona Jim film that people are clamoring to make, and goes upstairs from the merry throng to start writing.  Batala announces that he's back to take control of everything, and go back to launching his pet vanity project, which nobody but him likes.  But while there he reveals that he had a secret gun in the drawer of his desk that nobody had found...

After Lange shoots him, he's sort of in a daze, but Valentine keeps her head, and actually Bertie (not his real name) says sensibly, "well, if I'd killed anyone, I'd go on the run.  I'll drive you!" and they all head off to the opening scene.  (Jami and I both felt frustrated that they hadn't exploited the fact that everybody thinks Batala's already dead!  Just strip off the priest outfit and shove him in the river.)  Cut to the bookend, and Valentine has finished her story and awaits the pub crowd's verdict.  "Well, it's obvious what we must do," says one...

This film is definitely due a revival, what with all the obnoxious tech barons milling around and a new-found fondness in the youth for anti-capitalist ideas.  Maybe Luigi Mangione was inspired by it, who knows. 

Springy things

 

Film review: Cold Storage (2026)

What's Vanessa Redgrave up to these days? you ask yourself.  Well, would you believe acting in a fun little B-movie about a fungus that zombifies everyone and everything it encounters?  No, I wouldn't've either, but there she is, looking decidedly frail (and not just because she's playing a little old lady on her last legs, either).  

But she's not alone in slumming it, because Liam Neeson (stretching himself in the role of gruffly competent military man) and Leslie Manville (perhaps tired of worthy work with Mike Leigh, and itching to play a soldier who hides a nuclear device in her son's basement).

Anyway, you might wonder what this had to offer that was different from, say, The Last of Us, which is also about fungus turning everybody into zombies.  Answer: this film is basically a light-hearted romp, albeit with lots of heads exploding.  All the people who die deserve to die (maybe not the animals) and, in a very 80s-style (maybe even 50s-style) plot, the Military (or at least a few rogue individuals within it) does the right thing (using a bomb!) and solves the problem.

I tell a lie: in the pre-credit sequence, set about 25 years ago (which is still in the 2000s, to my horror), a likeable character does die, but (a) this part of the film is meant to set up the stakes and is correspondingly not comedic, and (b) we don't really have time to get to know the character before she meets her messy end.  This part is set in some tiny outback community where a chunk of Skylab landed in 1979, specifically a tank that had a fungus sample in it, and over the years it degraded to the extent that something got out.  The film starts with a woman (some NASA-affiliated fungus expert) getting a phone call at a cafe in Rome from somebody on a payphone in said tiny town.  The man is clearly panicked and seems to be reporting some kind of attack, but has been shunted from person to person until arriving at our expert.  She quickly jets there and along the way picks up a "team" which, in a running joke, she is surprise to find consists of just two (Neeson and Manville), who have been brought in to assess the risk.  They arrive on the outskirts of town, and, spotting no signs of life, put on Hazmat suits and head in to check out what's happened.  

They quickly find that everyone in town (a) is up on a roof, and (b) has exploded.  The fungus expert examines a tiny hole in the tank fan finds it full of glowing green stuff, in the course of which she manages to step on some, and it turns out her wellies aren't as air-tight as the Hazmat suit.  Still she gets a sample, puts it in a sealed container, and they're heading out of town with her in the lead when she starts to act erratically.  We, the viewers, know what's happened because we get a "fungus-eye view" of matters, and we have watched it climb up from the welly into her brain, and told her to spread it.  So, after complaining of smelling toast and feeling hot (a key plot point later) she runs to the one vehicle and starts to drive it away. Liam (I refuse to learn his character's name, because he's just Liam Neeson) jumps in front of the car and is thrown back and temporarily paralyzed (another key plot point, as he has a dickey back thereafter), the doctor gets out and holds Leslie Manville at gunpoint and then turns the gun on herself.  The team then calls in fighter jets to bomb the town with white phosphorus, and the sample is put in Cold Storage in a facility in Kansas.

And then the real movie starts.  The military has sold off the storage facility (with the important lower levels sealed off) to a private storage company, at which the night shift is just starting, and the horrible greasy biker boss "Griffin" argues with our just-arriving-in-his-implausibly-classic car (listening to affirmation tapes on his drive in) hero, "Teacake," 

appealingly played by one of the older Stranger Things kids.  The storage facility will be our home for the rest of the movie (except for brief excursions involving Liam Neeson being informed and him forming a bond with a female soldier on the end of a phone at some Military HQ, as well as linking up with Manville to pick up "item 7" on a list he deems necessary to deal with the problem), and it operates a lot like the Mall in Dawn of the Dead.  Especially once Griffin returns with a bunch of bikers, who will all meet with grisly fates.  But before then, we have a meet-cute with the new employee of the night shift, Naomi, who despite being a smarty-pants, in comparison with Teacake's well-meaning ex-con (she teaches him the word "loquacious," because he is), because she's taken science classes with the aim of becoming a vet, and before that we have Teacake shepherding an old lady (just recognizable as Vanessa Redgrave) to her storage unit, where she plans to kill herself with the gun she has there (after kissing a picture of her presumably dead husband) but takes a nap first, setting up a late intervention that was entirely predictable).

Anyway, things are kicked into gear when Teacake hears a harsh beep coming from somewhere and asks Naomi to help him find it.  It's coming from behind a plasterboard wall, where they see a lot of dusty old military equipment and a map showing the lower levels.  

(This is the alert that means that Neeson, now retired, is woken up from his bed, and only he knows how serious this is.  In fact, he's had a couple of decades of nagging the military to take it more seriously - even writing a "White Paper" (a phrase that gets uttered implausibly many times for a B-movie horror-comedy) about why global warming will eventually cause problems.)  Anyway, Teacake and Naomi find nastiness, but it has also already escaped, and infects the dead cat in the trunk of Naomi's "man-child" ex-baby-daddy, who has come to ask her advice, because he accidentally shot the cat.  But, as a flashback later reveals, he runs over an infected cockroach, which sends a tendril up into the trunk, re-animating the cat, which promptly seeks higher ground and explodes.  This sends splatter over both the ex and a nearby deer, and we've got a full-on outbreak.  Then the bikers show up because Griffin has a bunch of stolen TVs he wants to offload...

Anyway, silly stuff, very much not part of the current trend of dreary highbrow horror-as-metaphor-for-grief, and a pleasant enough diversion from the real horrors around us.