Flick

We open on
Jackie Chan
And Michael J Fox
Back to back
Ringfenced by zombies that pop
From the earth like bad teeth
No music
Just ragged breaths
And the low drone of the approaching zeppelin fleet

Dame Judi Dench is pissed as hell
She slaps the Chief’s coffee clean off his desk
‘No, you’re off the case!’ she yells,
Pulls her pistol from its shoulder holster
And looses two police-issue rounds
Point blank.
Swivel-chaired, he spins in place
Like a lazy susan;
We glimpse
Grim circuitry
Fizzing through his ruptured face.

Horizontal wipe to
Johnny Depp on the deck of the Battleship Potemkin
Locked in a desperate knife fight with at least fifty chimpanzees
Bookies chalk odds in crabbed hand, add
Cryptic annotation as
A roiling crowd of sweaty Korean men in vests
Invest fistfuls of filthy banknotes
Betting on his death by monkey strangulation

Odd couple Lindsey Lohan and Ben Kingsley
Make a hash of their suicide pact and wind up
Blinding half the kids in Stratford with some kind of
Industrial adhesive.
The experience puts their problems into perspective
And the pair decide to live.

Slam cut to
Jim Carrey in the slammer
Gulping down fifty glass eyes
One after the other

Crash zoom on
Sir Ian McKellen’s thespian anus
As it wobbles like a goldfish’s gob
And delivers a subtitled monologue
On age
And loss
And the importance of dignity

Track a dotted red line across an atlas to Japan:
Bathhouse Yakuza blot like bugs beneath
A panning minigun manned by Yoda
While Burt Kwok blows the top four floors
Off a government pagoda
Back in the oval office President Lassie
Reluctantly grants her cyborg death squads carte blanche

Dissolve to
Chevy Chase face-fucking Linda Lovelace
Till their mutual orgasms start an avalanche
Rosebud bunny-hops their doomed chalet roof
Ridden by the putrified remains of John Candy
The sledge goes off piste, hits a ski jump
Then powerslides through an advert hording,
A curling match, a busy street, a plate glass window,
A bean tin pyramid, a just-finished house of cards,
And a wedding reception,
Into an ice sculpture of Ghandi.

Bemused judges hold up scorecards.

For the final scene
We pan across a sunset beach
De Niro and Pacino
Under soft-focus fantasy palms
Making love to one another.

A baby nuke hits the ocean
Like an Alka Seltzer.