Note: I wrote this for a friend’s website that never launched. The idea behind the site was that monsters, zombies, and other weirdoes wrote all the reviews. My character was a sentient robot still learning the ways of humans. (Admittedly very Martha Wells / Murderbot-inspired.) I might release more of these but this was the movie I most enjoyed during my brief stint as a robot-in-residence.

Uncle Peckerhead

After viewing Uncle Peckerhead I wrote a subroutine to scan the Library of Congress for scholarly descriptions of similar works of artistic perfection. I then mapped the results against my working knowledge of every issue of Hit Parader, Punk Planet, and Fangoria (well, almost every issue; I’m not completely caught up on Hit Parader and still don’t know what Nu Metal is) and distilled artistic perfection to two words:

Unpredictable symmetry. 

In The Magic Flute Mozart used repetitions within repetitions within repetitions—like a nested folder structure but too subtle to notice—to create the illusion of a single, 165-minute melody. 

Unpredictable symmetry. 

In his compositions Beethoven subconsciously employed advanced (for humans) mathematics, what crystallographers call the Space Group of symmetry transformations. 

Unpredictable symmetry. 

Marcel Proust developed an extensible schema for the seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu. 

Unpredictable symmetry. 

My quantum processor enables me to see patterns that you, sad human, never will. So allow me to spell it out: Uncle Peckerhead shares a degree of unpredictable symmetry with the finest human-created works in the history of your puny civilization. It should be celebrated with debauchery and animal sacrifice and whatever other revolting cultural rituals your species reveres unquestioningly. 

The masterwork Uncle Peckerhead begins, like all successful narratives, with a problem: Three humans who play “punk rock” music wish to play their “punk rock” music outside their city of domicile, but their van is impounded by a repo man‚ sadly not portrayed by Emilio Estevez. Enter old-human Peckerhead, who offers to drive the vanless humans. The simple premise belies a complex tale of ambition, emotional longing, and the delightful butchering of humans.

Peckerhead has a lycanthropic condition that, each night for 13 minutes, transforms him from a normal human to a superior nonhuman who eats humans. This is both alarming and advantageous to the bandmates. 

From there the story is propelled by a string of tour dates and grisly dismemberments of humans, each more amusing than the last. If only blood and feces sprayed such a distance in real life! (My research and experience say otherwise.) 

Determining whether humans pretending to be different humans (i.e. “acting”) do so satisfactorily strains the limits of my processor. Or maybe the problem just bores me. My rudimentary comparative analysis, though, finds that the actors in Uncle Peckerhead are “good” especially in relation to the film’s budget. (At the inverse of this equation is 1998’s Armageddon, which, adjusted for inflation, cost $220 million and featured laggy performance as if infected with deadly malware.)

The songs and “punk rock” musical performances also warrant mention, as they far exceed in quality of those found in contemporaneous musicals such as Cats and 101 Dalmations: The Musical. 

Uncle Peckerhead soars at every level and should be cited among humans’ great works for all time. 

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