Shanghai Surprise

SHANGHAI SURPRISE

(PG-13, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/HandMade Films, 97 mins., theatrical release date: August 29, 1986)

Should Panda Express ever introduce a new entrée called Mandarin Turkey, Lionsgate Films ought to immediately negotiate a tie-in deal to offer free DVD copies of Shanghai Surprise. I'm serious about that.

I say this after NetFlix has decided that the best way for me to view this was via Artisan Entertainment's pathetically outdated 2003 release. In case you weren't an avid video collector back then, Artisan were to digital video what SLP mavens Avid Video [ahem] were to the VHS contingent. They were catalog title distributors who offered up low-grade transfers basically selling unsuspecting consumers VHS dupes transferred to disc, freed from the tyranny of original aspect ratios and special features. The standard retail prices for their titles were hardly worth the effort, and unless you really needed to revisit Watchers or Shadows Run Black out of your own masochism, well...just watch Dirty Dancing again. That was all they were good for.

Lionsgate rectified this by issuing an actual "special edition" several years later, complete with all manner of tacky talking heads showcases and a "Fans Unite!" audio commentary from a quintet of male Madonna scholars. NetFlix didn't get that memo, and thus I am in the temporary possession of a stagnated piece of plastic which may as well represent Madonna's own presence in the film.

What a hell of a way to see China.

Howard the Duck, at least, had actual contemporary interviews with accessories to the crime, chiefly creators Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz as well as stars Lea Thompson and Jeffrey Jones. Nobody wanted to reflect upon the making of Shanghai Surprise, meanwhile, Howard's immediate contender as the biggest flop of 1986 and cutthroat multiple Razzie nominee, which may as well be a given since, as it is now as it was then, its real legacy rests squarely on its long-estranged leading actors, Sean Penn and Madonna.

Oh, the 1980s, you worked in mysterious ways. How did two of the most disparate egos in show biz manage to tie the knot for a bated-breath audience of tabloid junkies and industry insiders? What circumstances led the Me Decade's premier Method actor to declare his vows to the Queen of Pop? What was going through George Harrison's mind when he pursued this project despite the baggage associated with this diabolical duo?

Yes, Shanghai Surprise was produced by the Quiet Beatle himself, the same man who got into film simply because he felt Monty Python's Life of Brian was too precious not to be shared with the wide world. Harrison's HandMade Films also helped produce a slew of British cult classics such as The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits and Withnail and I. And if Harrison had not taken out that mortgage on his own humble abode, the UK would never know the discreet charms of The Burning, which HandMade distributed theatrically alongside Venom, the movie which pitted Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed and a Black Mamba against each other in a grudge match for the ages.

The prospect of a George Harrison/Madonna duet would go unfulfilled, sadly, as evident in the opening credits of Shanghai Surprise, which were animated by none other than Maurice Binder. If Madonna's British affectations had kicked in before her dalliance with Guy Ritchie, then by rights she'd be the one taunting George with the line "You must be crazy/You got no money/And you're a liar."

And George...oh, dear: "My straits are dire from the wok into the fire/I'd like to trust you but I've broken my rickshaw." I didn't think he could make Paul "Spies Like Us" McCartney sound hip, but it happened. I can't find my brave face, and I haven't even made it to the man's musical credit.

Enough time lapses for me to think about the bizarre choice about having Sean Penn inherit Sir Roger Moore's mantle before the movie takes us to 1937, the year when the Japanese occupied China. There we meet Walter Faraday (Paul "Belloq" Freeman) enjoying a hearty, crunchy dinner with what looks like steel chopsticks. Because heaven knows, you never smuggle 1000 pounds of opium on an empty stomach. Ironically, the morbidly obese man sitting across from him demands he get a move on, as there are Jap soldiers outside their door. "Their beef's with the Chinese," Faraday counters, savoring the taste of his own plate of delicious Alpo. The Chinese's beef is with him!

As the rickshaws pull Faraday and his loot towards international waters, the self-described "Opium King" (have it your way, Faraday) decides to pay a visit to a certain China Doll. We never see his supposed maiden, instead being treated to the first of many double-crosses as Wu absconds with the bounty and both Faraday and his fat companion, a journalist named Willie Tuttle (Richard Griffiths), are cornered by the foot soldiers of Chinese official Mei Gan (Kay Tong Lim), who wants returned to him what he feels is rightfully owned. In lieu of that, Mei Gan confiscates Faraday's utility belt and starts emptying out its contents, only to trigger the explosive within its final compartment and have his hands blown clean off. Faraday and Tuttle make a run for the nearest harbor and dive right in, but the secret police open fire and apparently murder Faraday. I say "apparently," because...well, you'll see.

One year later, the whereabouts of the opium treasure, or "Faraday's Flowers," continue to remain unknown. A pair of missionaries tending to wounded Chinese troops have a rendezvous with destiny when they seek a bilingual stooge to bankroll for investigative purposes. Their salvation comes in the form of an unkempt drunkard, Glendon Wasey (Sean Penn), booted off his boat to Los Angeles for insufficient funds. The elderly Mr. Burns assigns his associate Gloria Tatlock (Madonna) to watch over Wasey, who will receive a ticket back home provided he locates the father of a mortally wounded rickshaw carrier, one Wu Ch‘En She.

You can tell that what Miss Tatlock is really interested in are Faraday's Flowers, as the opium within them could be used as morphine to administer to her patients. Wasey catches wise to the deception, but stays on the search though coercion and thus leads us into a veritable slew of shady ancillary characters and dead ends. Wasey encounters Faraday's beloved China Doll (Sonserai Lee), a concubine with delusions of empress-style grandeur, and thus piques the curiosity of Mei Gan and porcelain replacement hands. He is also shadowed by the lanky Justin Kronk (Philip Sayer), who is in cahoots with Mr. Tuttle, and there is also a baseball-obsessed entrepreneur named Joe Go (Clyde Kusatsu) and his Oddjob-esque muscle (Professor Toru Tanaka). All of these characters also have their fingers in the pie, and it's up to Wasey and Tatlock to navigate these interlopers if they hope to uncover Faraday's Flowers.

Shanghai Surprise was a fiasco from the word go, as George Harrison (who worked with Michael Kamen on the film score and manages a couple of decent original tunes such as "Breath Away from Heaven" and the especially salvageable "Someplace Else") himself admitted in interviews where he grieved over the poor choice of script, director and leads. Infamous stories abound over Sean Penn's ill temper and the constant friction on set. If only these anecdotes amounted to a camp classic, as this is more a confusing and slapdash assemblage of worn-out adventure movie clichés reliant entirely on the superficial novelty value afforded by putting Penn and Madonna into a period play date.

Penn tries to make the best of the situation, but the nature of his particular acting style contradicts the film's supposed fluffiness. Even as early as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Penn's Methodical meticulousness put him squarely in the lineage of Robert De Niro rather than Clark Gable. The role demands a playful, roguish charisma which he instead plays way too sour-faced and stoic. Given his beginnings as Jeff Spicoli, the precursor to the likes of Bill & Ted & Wayne & Garth, you'd think Sean could make lemonade out of the material, but he seems to be out of his element and doesn't commit with the same compelling brio he reserves for his dramatic roles. That being said, Penn does endeavor, particularly when he consoles a regretful, drunken Miss Tatlock after she places him under "obligation."

If it's not love that you need, then he'll try his best to make everything succeed, I suppose.

The real weak link throughout is, no surprise and all shanghai, Madonna. In only her second major film role following Desperately Seeking Susan, she is making a dreadful reach in the kind of role you expect from one of the Old Hollywood fixtures she rapped about in "Vogue." Alas, she proves no exception to the rule that being an established pop icon doesn't automatically make you a star actress. Madonna is perpetually frigid and awkward as Miss Tatlock, her appalling inability to mine humor or honesty in any situation marking her as fatally unfit for a farce, let alone any movie trying to sell her as a 1930s missionary. To be fair, it's not as if the screenplay gives her an arc, making half-hearted references to a phony identity and a loose morality which are not followed up on. This disingenuousness is emblematic of both the character and the performance.

Put these miscast lovebirds together and you got a movie that doesn't so much sing as yowl like a cat with a stiletto through its tail. The romantic heat between them is vaporous, a form of anti-chemistry which invites more speculation on their notoriously erratic private lives than any investment in their celluloid personalities. I mean, compare this to Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, released a year before Shanghai Surprise, which deliberately modernized Frank Capra's It Happened One Night with two then-unknown actors who weren't real life items. That John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga clicked charmingly whilst Penn and Madonna flounder from one crummy confrontation to the next shows up the utter famine of faith on behalf of all involved.

Shanghai Surprise disgraces all of its varied lineages, not just the Casablancas and The African Queens of rosy vintage, but even the more contemporary James Bond and Indiana Jones sagas. The supporting players don't even compel on the most rudimentary level of exposition, and their motivations are contrived to the point of abject confusion. The plot, adapted from a novel published in 1978, has all the meticulous structure of a fifth-rate Choose Your Own Adventure book, with threads involving bogus diamonds and the sanctioned intimidations of Mei Gan going absolutely, implausibly nowhere. The recreated Chinese backdrop, which should be distinctly colorful, is staged with dispiriting drabness by director Jim Goddard, who makes even mid-eighties John Glen (Octopussy, A View to a Kill) look like classic Terence Young (From Russia with Love, Thunderball).

Going back to Howard the Duck for a second, and the mention of Lea Thompson and Jeffrey Jones. That movie is terrible, yes, but at least one could feel duly ashamed that actual talent went to waste, as Thompson was so beguiling in Back to the Future and Jones was in peak form in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Shanghai Surprise offers no such luxury, with the slight exception of Sean Penn, and even then his off-screen cockiness put merciful paid to any notions that he and Madonna's presence alone was publicity enough. They weren't working actors who managed to find themselves in a flop, these two willed it upon themselves and have done little to lighten up in the meantime. Shanghai Surprise stinks of a massive ego trip to this day even if its principals continue to ignore it, and so should you.

Still my guitar gently weeps.

Of Unknown Origin

OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
(R, Warner Bros. Pictures, 88 mins., theatrical release date: November 24, 1983)

You have to respect the audacity of a major studio like Warner Bros. back in the early 1980s. Whereas all of their competitors were clamoring to capitalize on the slasher movie boom launched by the success of Paramount's Friday the 13th series, the company rolled out a steady stream of genre movies that didn't revolve around horny adolescents getting hacked to bits by rotting bogeys. Ignoring Eyes of a Stranger from 1981, Warner released anything but the typical Dead Teenager Movie, be they anthology films (Creepshow, Twilight Zone: The Movie), adult psychodramas (Altered States, The Hand) or nature's revenge sagas.

That latter subgenre was surprisingly prevalent for Warner, especially with Stephen King's Cujo, Aussie import Russell Mulcahy's hog wild Razorback and not one but two Canadian productions involving killer rats. The first was the loose James Herbert adaptation Deadly Eyes, which was directed by the same man who made the Joe Don Baker vs. mad mongrels obscurity The Pack for Warner Bros. back in the 1970s.

Apparently seizing upon a non-existent trend, the studio followed the April Fool's Day debut of that film with Of Unknown Origin in late autumn of 1983. Compared to Robert Clouse's predecessor, this particular chiller seemed scaled back and somewhat riskier in several regards. For one, Deadly Eyes depicted a horde of homicidal rodents of the legendary "Dachsunds dressed in rat costume" variety running amok around Toronto. Secondly, that film's screenwriter Charles H. Eglee made no secret about his derivations from John Sayles' script for Piranha, and indeed the multiple subplots involving love triangles, political greed and steroid-polluted grain dates it as a relic of the post-Peter Benchley school of schlock you could call Jaws-ploitation.

Thirdly, as the presence of a Bruce Lee screening in that film makes plain, Clouse was an established journeyman filmmaker whose career was launched by Lee's posthumous Enter the Dragon, securing him steady work for both the Warners and Hong Kong production outfit Golden Harvest for many years, including Deadly Eyes.

Of Unknown Origin, meanwhile, differs not only from Deadly Eyes but also the prior likes of Willard and Ben in that there is but one lone furry foe to deal with instead of a swarm of them. And it ain't no upholstered dog, neither. The screenplay by Brian Taggart, also based on a published novel called The Visitor by Chauncey G. Parker III, confines the action to a single building instead of loosing it on the city at large. And instead of a successful American filmmaker, Canuck impresarios Pierre David and Claude Héroux tapped an unknown European by the name of Yorgo Pan Cosmatos in his first cross-Atlantic project. Best known as George P. Cosmatos to the Anglican public, he would later go on to make a name in the United States with the Stallone collaborations Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra.

Also thrown into the mix was an up-and-coming actor named Peter Weller in his first lead role, following an acclaimed turn as Diane Keaton's new beau in Alan Parker's domestic drama Shoot the Moon. Subsequent roles as Buckaroo Banzai, RoboCop and William Lee (from Cronenberg's film version of Naked Lunch) turned Weller into a reluctant genre icon, but his characterization of proud businessman Bart Hughes here is pretty meek compared to the more forceful personalities of his later fan favorite characters. There's still a sardonic intellect and stoic tension to be admired in Weller, and although the lack of wider location use smells of staginess, Weller is a bracing presence who remains collected within the confined spaces of the narrative.

The resulting film is like a cross between Herman Melville and Hanna-Barbera, with Weller playing the Tom to the sewer-dwelling Jerry and taking repeated thwacks to his equilibrium in the process. The movie opens with Bart Hughes seeing off his gorgeous wife Meg (Shannon Tweed, hardly modest in her pre-soft core debut) and cutesy son Peter (Leif Anderson) as they leave for vacation to visit her father out in Vermont. The workaholic Bart stays behind to focus on the grain deal he's excelling at for his Manhattan trust company post, only to learn that he's been reassigned with a bank branch merger which could signal instant promotion and a hearty raise, provided he meets his two-week deadline.

The newfound privacy in his self-renovated brownstone ought to clear up Bart's anxieties about the sudden transfer, but he is startled by the leaking water pipe behind the dishwasher. The plumber he hires, Cleve (Louis Del Grande), deduces that the marks on the busted vein could have come from an army of mice, or at least one iron-toothed rat, something Bart scoffs at but takes heed of anyway when he starts placing mousetraps that are soon mangled beyond repair. Cleve tells him that whatever he's dealing with possess a frightening survival instinct, and may God help Bart if that rat turns out to have babies.

Bart also starts to show signs of distress at his bank office, taking lunch breaks to research the history of rat infestations and voicing his knowledge at a dinner party, almost as a rebellion against the grain project being taken over by his insidious rival James Hall (Kenneth Welsh). Bart's boss Eliot Riverton (the ever-prolific Lawrence Dane) and faithful secretary Lorrie Wells (Jennifer Dale) watch with shock at his increasing instability, and as the battle of wits between Bart and the vermin escalates, complete with ransacked pantries and mutilated kitties, Bart becomes a fanatical yuppie Ahab who must finally take matters in his own hands.

Cosmatos' direction is a tricky mix of the somber and silly, stylistic enough to effectively portray the rat as a shadowy menace capable of a few uncomfortable surprises (you might think twice before you ever lift your toilet cover again) but also drawn out to ludicrous degrees. It's all designed to illustrate Bart's slow-burning insanity and the violent deconstruction of his civilized demeanor, and there are even a couple of domestic nightmares and allusions to Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea. But the plot progresses with lackadaisical leisure, to the point where even the proverbial final straw is rendered mundane.

But maybe that's part of why the movie works as well as it does, its anti-supernatural gravity, urban ennui and pervading isolation going against the typical community-minded terror of its brethren. It's a character piece first and foremost more than a mere string of shopworn shock, kind of like Roger Christian's overlooked and astute The Sender (1982) which benefited from a multi-dimensional lead performance by Kathryn Harrold. In that regard, Peter Weller's performance is all the more entertaining and credible, his constant lapses in mood from enervation to nonchalance consistently amusing given how economical the conflict is.

The film grasps at metaphor by depicting Bart's frustrations at work ("This isn't a trust company, it's the court of Louis XIV") as a parallel to the rat chase which consumes him. The dinner party spiel, where he prattles off a series of queasy statistics and cultural idiosyncrasies involving rats, is the cornerstone of his alienation from his stuffy social standing. Eventually, in the midst of his mania, he delivers an ultimatum to his manager, who demands he sort out his affairs at home, and nearly makes a pass on his typist, a cursory nod to the allure of "while the cat's away" infidelity. The latter aspect has no true repercussions, though, and comes across as padding.

Beyond that, Cosmatos ratchets up the tension between homeowner and home wrecker, employing a diversity of POV shots, split-diopter widescreen framing and some excellent camera tracking to break up the monotony. But there comes a point where Bart makes such blunders as sending a stray cat in to do his bidding, leaving a check for an exterminator which is duly clawed or fishing in his townhouse's model for a steel trap (thus fulfilling the meager gore quota after it snaps) that the film grows repetitive in the worst way. Of course, it's all in service of the nutty final ten minutes, where Bart gears up in miner garb and augments a baseball bat with sharp objects to violently swat at the rat and thus destroys his architectural pride and joy.

Of Unknown Origin may not have been as easily marketable as Deadly Eyes or earlier animal attack films like Piranha, Tentacles or Ants! The trailer itself grandstands to a degree where it could be misconstrued as yet another Amityville film. Maybe it's a result of the film's inherent dryness, as it is far from the broad comedy of the later Mousehunt and less sensationalist than any of Pierre David's other horror co-productions. Yet Cosmatos' foreign sensibilities do work to his advantage here, especially compared to the hackneyed slickness of his subsequent Stallone actioners. And in Peter Weller's infallible commitment, Cosmatos has hit the rare jackpot in championing character over carnage. Let this be unknown no more.

Shakma

SHAKMA
(R, Quest Entertainment, 100 mins., release date: October 5, 1990)

This is an Orlando-shot killer monkey film with the name Shakma.

Shakma!

Shakma!!

Watch the monkey get hur...

No, I promised myself I wouldn't reference a certain Peter Gabriel song which was previously the opening credits music for another film about scared simians. There's more that needs to be said about this film than just a mere slam-dunk, MST3k-style allusion. God help me to hold out long enough to find the right words to discuss Shakma, of all things.

Well, first off, the film's alternate, international title is Panic in the Tower, whose cover art superimposes a shrieky monkey over what appears to be the Nakatomi Plaza. That gives the impression that the movie makes cunning use of its particular architectural coup, which is something that does not happen at all throughout the 100 minutes of this lame attempt at a Showtime original movie. At no point does the mad mandrill chase its victims through ventilation ducts or up to some cryptic, undiscovered floor of the building. The monkey doesn't corner anyone on the roof, which seems wrong considering it's a vital cliché for a movie of such stunning originality as Shakma.

It's just a group of people forever stuck on the fourth floor, no climbing or swinging required. You could almost call it existential given how restless the movie makes you feel.

Secondly, the filmmakers went to the trouble of casting a credited animal performer named Typhoon the Baboon. Sadly, he never would act again before or after this, but he fares better than his slumming homosapien co-stars, among them Ape-man Roddy McDowall and Blue Lagoon maroon Christopher Atkins, going from Beaks to Cheeks. The method acting going in Typhoon's primitive brain whenever he hurls himself against a door, which comprises much of his role, is a wonderful thing. Compare him to Roddy McDowall, who appears to have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's throughout. At least he's not living the self-fulfilling prophecy of standing idly by as a demented madman in a ski mask runs around, hacking up young virgins.

There's also Amanda Wyss and Ari Meyers as the dueling eye candy, Wyss being Atkins' primary love interest and Meyers the infatuated younger girl, respectively. Amanda Wyss has the edge because she was involved in three seminal 1980s films: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Better Off Dead... The former Kate & Allie teen starlet, meanwhile, went from playing Al Pacino's fictional daughter in the overlooked Author! Author! to starring alongside The Barbarian Brothers and a chicken bone. And I also kept confusing her with Lori Loughlin.

Shakma begins with some tender scenes of graphic brain surgery, no doubt intended to shock you to life (sorry), but also to introduce us to Roddy McDowall as Dr. Sorenson, chief of staff for the medical school situated in this ten-story office building meant to be a tower. Sorenson and his charges also apparently have a proud weekend tradition involving a Dungeons & Dragons-style LARP game called "Nemesis," where they adopt secret identities and wander aimlessly throughout the rooms collecting clues to help rescue the princess situated on the fifth floor, like they're Gleep Glop and the Floopty-Doos.

Enter the monkey in the wrench, Shakma, the titular baboon who reacts harshly to having his naked brain injected with corticotropin. He attacks the students, drawing blood from one of them, and is sedated by his trainer Sam (Atkins) before Sorenson arrives in a fit of exasperation and demands Shakma be put to sleep. Sam realizes he made a mistake by injecting the wrong substance into his prized pet, but shrugs it off and decides to let the resident lackey Richard (Greg Flowers) dispose of the damned, dirty ape.

Vague statements of scientific purpose aside, the game remains on, with Richard's sister Kimberly (Meyers) playing the fair maiden and Sorenson as the Game Master, tracking their progress through homing devices and walkie-talkie updates. The players in this case are Sam, his feisty girlfriend Tracy (Wyss), token black Gary (Robb Morris), and noxious nerd Bradley (Tre Laughlin), who sounds like the Comic Book Guy doing a John Malkovich impression.

But Shakma is far from dead, which Bradley learns the hard way when he goes into the specimen room to find Shakma having killed and/or eaten nearly all the caged critters before experiencing a fatal monkey pile. Sorenson sends Richard to investigate, and he too gets assaulted by Shakma despite arming himself with a glass of hydrochloric acid. Sorenson leaves his post to discover Richard's melted corpse, but cannot hitch an elevator ride to safety in time before he gets his own demise. This leaves Sam and Tracy to ponder all manner of failed distractions and escape plans, with Shakma poised to attack around virtually every corner.

Did I mention that this simian slasher film takes up 100 minutes of film? That's nearly two hours of screen time, all in the service of a thinly-plotted excuse for bloodletting which is as mediocre in its supposed scares as it is presenting the contrived scenario which isolates the various characters. It runs about as long as either King Kong Lives or Link, only without the bracingly apeshit inanity of either film. Shakma just dawdles along in its dumbness, especially in the overlong attempts of its erstwhile heroes to take charge of a situation that should not be so difficult to control.

The situation is that Sorenson has locked up the entire building, including every office where a phone may be conveniently accessed, and apparently even the windows prove inconvenient for any rescue. All this for a silly LARP more than any sense of security. Whenever Sam suggests escaping from the ground floor or Tracy produces a strobe light, the results fizzle out ridiculously. A tremendous deal of the chasing involves the duo holding the stairwell door closed as Shakma bounces repeatedly off it before scampering away. The only real moment of tension is when Tracy hides herself in a wooden bureau, Shakma clawing away murderously, but even this is defused by Sam's utter impotence as a hero, something which the finale tries to subvert by activating his own primal instincts, but instead provokes half-hearted chuckles much like the rest of the endeavor.

You'd think there would be some kind of novelty to a baboon as bogeyman, but directors Hugh Parks (another cautionary tale in exploitation history) and Tom Logan fail to capitalize. With the exception of the acid-burned Richard, Shakma's pouncing upon the human cast is dull and reliant on big reveals rather than bloody wrestling (the scenes of which you do get are reliably laughable). Furthermore, given how many times it tries to break through the stairwell door, you wonder how come Shakma's doesn't lose an arm in the struggle, or at least experience some minor injury when confronted with acid. Even the allegedly trained monkey doesn't appear to be directed properly, which further discredits the supposed bond between Sam and Shakma.

Poor Christopher Atkins, a frequent Razzie regular (A Night in Heaven, Listen to Me) who was even up for the "Worst New Star of the Decade" prize the year Shakma was released, makes for a bland male lead, routinely overshadowed by Typhoon as well as the likes of the charming Amanda Wyss (who gets away with the movie's crowning achievement in dopey dialogue with the line "You are sooo male!") and the coasting Roddy McDowall. The rest of the cast is wholly negligible given how keen the movie is to have them bumped off, which could constitute a series of mercy killings given how much color they add to the proceedings, if only the film weren't so boring.

The trailer for Shakma, however, is truly legendary. Not only does it compact the essence of the main characters in a tighter way than the movie proper, but the Percy Rodrigues stand-in doing the narration really goes bananas by the end. I mean, seriously..."Christopher Atkins, two-time winner of the National Association of Theatre Owners' 'Star of the Year' award, first for Blue Lagoon, now for Shakma." You don't even have to watch this amateurishly-edited preview to ask yourself, "What theaters did this ever play in?" But I recommend you do...