#terry windell

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TREKMATCH! # 661 - Voyager's "Dark Frontier" vs 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

James Bond is set upon an infamous assassin who has stolen a device that makes harnessing the power of the sun possible! What, a Casio watch? As a kid this was my favorite Bond because it was one of two we had on tape (with License to Kill) and also I liked the bizarre funhouse sequence, but it's sorta bad. Like, I'm no gun connoisseur but wouldn't a solid gold bullet shatter when the propellant fires off? Also in order to use the sun's energy a giant mirror has to focus the sunlight into a super powerful laser beam. Didn't they have solar panels in 1974???? Also also every Bond movie obviously has a nefarious view of the world, but while in Thailand Bond has to fight... sumo wrestlers. Where they even trying? There's one really good car jump though.

GRADE: C-

STAR TREK: VOYAGER - "Dark Frontier"

Voyager plans a heist to steal some transwarp coils from a Borg Cube to help them get ho,e faster only to have Seven of Nine hypnotized back into the collective by the Borg Queen! Hey wasn't she melted in First Contact? I guess it's a different actress so I suppose it's a different Borg Queen. There's more than one queen bee in the world I suppose. Though why does Alice Krige come back as the Borg Queen for Voyager's finale? Are they just cloning different queens?

GRADE: C

Victory to Trek, so Trek is up 334-327!

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TREKMATCH! # 490 - Voyager's "Gravity" vs 1986's Maximum Overdrive

MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE

A comet's tail covers Earth in space dust, bringing all machines to life! Well, not *all* machines, since a gun is a machine and those seem fine, but probably best not to think about whatever spurious iotas of science may or may not exist here. A rag tag group of strangers including Lisa Simpson, Gus Fring, and Emilio Estevez wind up trapped by a bunch of 18 Wheelers in a truck stop, sort of like a car version of Night of the Living Dead. People (including Stephen King, who wrote, adapted, and directed the movie) hate this one, but I think it's great - it'll kill anyone (including children), and the broad daylight that most of the movie takes place during gives it a very different feel than any other 80s horror flick.

GRADE: B+

STAR TREK: VOYAGER - "Gravity"

Tuvok and Paris get sucked into a wormhole and trapped on a planet where time passes way more quickly than back on Voyager for story reasons. They spend months there where they befriend a Lori Petty alien who also maybe falls a little in love with Tuvok. But he's married! And also Vulcans don't have feelings (asterisk)! Sounds like a recipe for heartbreak if you ask me.

GRADE: A-

Victory to Trek, so Trek is up 249-241!

Stephen King movies are tied with Trek 6-6!

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TREKMATCH! # 470 - Voyager's "Ashes to Ashes" vs 1978's Salem's Lot

SALEM'S LOT

An author returns to a town he lived in a couple years as a kid in order to write about a spooky old house. Turns out the spooky old house is filled with damn vampires! Well, a vampire, but he keeps making new vampires. It's a two part TV miniseries so watching its three hours in one go is a bit, hmmm, excruciating, but I thought the vampire kids scratching at the window was scary.

GRADE: C-

STAR TREK: VOYAGER - "Ashes to Ashes"

A dead Voyager crewmember returns to the ship but don't worry, she's no vampire. Instead her corpse was reanimated by an alien species who procreates by jumpstarting dead bodies they find and surgically slash mentally altering them. I mean look, go to TNG if you want some political metaphor space speeches, go to DS9 for sweeping war story arcs, go to Voyager for batshit off the wall hard sci-fi weirdness.

GRADE: A-

Victory to Voyager, putting Trek up 236 to 234!

King and Trek are tied 1-1!

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TREKMATCH! # 460 - Voyager's "Critical Care" vs 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Cap is trying to adjust to life as an outdated relic or whatever when there's a big evil conspiracy that he and his best frenemy forever Nick Fury uncover at SHIELD. Things get even more complicated when Steve's presumed dead best friend forever Bucky turns up doing some murders for hire. Like maybe they didn't have therapy in the forties but add that to your list after Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man, dude! In the Marvel Netflix shows they always kept referring to the alien invasion of NYC as "The Incident," but if you ask me three flying aircraft carriers falling outta the sky into the Potomac qualifies as an incident too.

GRADE: A

STAR TREK: VOYAGER - "Critical Care"

The Doctor gets kidnapped and forced to work in a hospital where the poor are left to die of treatable illnesses while the rich get all the preventative care and plastic surgery they want. Wotta backwards society, can you even imagine?

GRADE: A-

Victory to Winter Soldier, so Trek is up 231 to 229!

MCU Phase II is up on Trek 2-1!

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TREKMATCH! # 300 - Enterprise's "Breaking The Ice" vs 2009's Futurama: Into The Wild Green Yonder

FUTURAMA: INTO THE WILD GREEN YONDER

The Planet Express gang works to stop an evil industrialist from destroying some nice nature preserve planets that may hurt the balance of life in the universe. It's fine I guess but I sorta wish they didn't have Billy West doing a racist Asian voice for Leo Wong - they should've known better than that shit!

GRADE: C-

STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE - "Breaking The Ice"

Enterprise finds the biggest comet ever discovered but then a Vulcan ship spying on them says "oh we actually saw it five minutes ago." Reed and Mayweather land on the comet and make a Vulcan snowman while T'Pol wrassles with her arranged marriage she doesn't want to do. Hey she could always do that fight to the death option Spock's fiancee will do in a hundred years!

GRADE: C

Victory to Trek, so Trek is up 152-148!

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TREKMATCH! # 390 - Voyager's "Natural Law" vs 2020's Underwater

UNDERWATER

Some regular schlubs are on a super deep sea drilling rig at the bottom of the Marianas Trench when oops, basically the whole thing gets crushed by the immense pressure. The six or seven survivors' have to strap into some big heavy diving suits with those internal helmet lights that point right at their faces so we can see the actors and walk across the ocean floor to safety. Too bad there are some, shall we say, "Lovecraftesque" monsters down there!

GRADE: C

STAR TREK: VOYAGER - "Natural Law"

Seven and Chakotay crash into a planet and meet some indigenous people that the show's soundtrack condescends to by playing a stereotypical wooden flute whenever they are on screen. The show also condescends to them by actually slathering them in red fucking makeup! Meanwhile back in space Tom gets a speeding ticket and is forced to take driver's ed. That part is good anyway.

GRADE: D

Victory to Underwater, so Trek is up 196-194!

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TREKMATCH! # 321 - Voyager's "Prophecy" vs 1988's Men Behind The Sun

MEN BEHIND THE SUN aka Hēi Tài Yáng 731 aka 黑太阳731

This is another of those super extreme gore movies that I guess I felt I had to watch as a horror snob or whatever. It's not especially gorier than like, Day of the Dead or the Saw movies, but it's incredibly difficult to watch because it's based on an actual historical Japanese unit (731) who conducted lethal biological research on captive Chinese civilians during World War II, killing thousands of people. (As far as the filmmakers, they killed a bunch of rats for the movie and filmed a real child's autopsy so that's nowhere near as bad but still rough to watch.) Anyway, at least the people in charge of the real camp got tried for war crimes. Oh, wait, what's that? They were granted immunity by the United States in exchange for all their research? Well that's just super.

GRADE: C-

STAR TREK: VOYAGER - "Prophecy"

One day in the dang Delta Quadrant Voyager gets attacked by a hundred year old Klingon vessel that it turns out is crewed by a buncha religious pilgrims. What else it turns out is that they suddenly decide B'Elanna's unborn child is the Jesus they've been looking for the past century, so they blow up their ship to live on Voyager. Uh, thanks for asking first?

GRADE: A-

Victory to Voyager, so Trek is back up 161-160!

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TREKMATCH! # 292 - Voyager's "Survival Instinct" vs 2019's The Kitchen

THE KITCHEN

A group of Irish mob wives decide to take over running the crime show whenever their husbands get sent to prison. It's an interesting choice to have two women known for comedy (Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish) play two of the leads in this drama but it's not especially an interesting movie - like, I'm supposed to root for the *Irish* mob, one of the top three most racist mobs out there? I did like how Elisabeth Moss' character fell in love with murdering though.

GRADE: C-

STAR TREK: VOYAGER - "Survival Instinct"

A couple of Seven's old college pals (she went to technical college) show up to reconnect. Actually, they show up to disconnect - it turns out they all left the Borg collective, too, except the three of them are brain-tied to each other and wanna get independent. Seven learns a bit about life and family courtesy of young Naomi Wildman. I wonder if the actress who played Ensign Wildman was ever sad that her daughter character wound up getting way more screen time than her?

GRADE: C+

Victory to Trek, so Trek is up 147-145!