Batman and Robin: The Re-Novelization
Part 14
we rejoin our heroes/villians/anti-heroes, whatever, some jerkoffs, in the rainforest, shortly after Dr. Pamela Isley was covered in a bunch of chemicals for the crime of suggesting that maybe making a freak supersoldier was unwise…
The storm had passed, and a full moon shone down on the abandoned South American prison.
Starting with weather, always smart. Always the best way to set the scene, especially for the elderly who LOVE weather and are probably going to really enjoy this vision of The Dark Knight. This is a big audience for this movie, and, of course, the novelization. Put down your James Pattersons, olds, Batman and Robin is here at last!
Inside the prison/lab, Jason Woodrue stood at Pamela Isley’s workstation, riffling through her voluminous research notes and cut-out Cathy comic strips that she insisted were hilarious, and everyone humored her because when someone finds something so unfunny entertaining, it makes you wonder how pathetic the rest of their life is. How horrible is their everyday existence if Cathy’s adventures in changing rooms and trying to not eat baked goods serve as an action-packed escape?
Woodrue wiped a tear from his face as he spoke into his mobile phone.
“Yes, sir. I’m so pleased you won the bidding, your supreme ruthlessness.” He paused as Bane screamed in the distance. It was hard to define this scream as one of pain or one of comedy. Sounded like a pain scream, but the timing was pure comedy gold. “We’re making the final modifications to Bane right now. Spiky belt, tall boots. Mostly a bunch of stuff that was abandoned at a dominatrix’s old apartment. We’ll have a thousand, slabby super-soldiers of varying levels of bear-type sexiness out to you tomorrow by overnight mail.”
Woodrue flicked the phone off. For a moment, there was perfect silence. Then—a rustling. Woodrue frowned and squinted at a patch of ivy. If there was one thing Woodrue hated, it was rustling. Sure, the screams of the damned, those poor souls horrifically mutated by his works, that was one thing, but rustling was just so goddamn annoying. At least when someone was calling out for his mother while his skin split and his biceps exploded, at least you knew what the SOURCE was, you know? With rustling, you could never be sure, and it was maddening.
Before Woodrue could become any more Larry-David-like, a figure burst from beneath the vegetation.
A woman stood before him, magenta hair gleaming in the moonlight.
Wait, magenta?
I would describe the hair as red. Specifically, hex code #8c0f1e. Magenta, of course, being in the neighborhood of #920064. Related colors, but magenta is more…
AH, I see. I’ve got the notes that didn’t make the final novelization. The red I see in the movie is her head hair. The magenta reference is to, er, other hair. Poison Ivy’s Magenta-Lined Beef Curtains, to quote specifics. My mistake.
Isley’s eyes blazed chlorophyll-green, her glasses, about 25 grams of plastic which somehow hid the fact that she had a slammin’ bod, no longer present.
Her ravaged clothes revealed the form and bearing of a goddess. Of a type. If you’re Quentin Tarantino, for sure a goddess. If you’re not Quentin Tarantino, a solid 8 out of 10 that you come to appreciate more as you age, but still, it’s not like we’re looking at Salma Hayek, here. No Sofia Vergara. She doesn’t have ridiculously huge jugs, is what I’m getting at, so 15 year-olds, do your best to jerk off to this movie, but it’s cool if you need to take a break from this and watch Wild Wild West to finish. Minute 54 of Wild Wild West, to be exact.
You probably thought I was going to suggest From Dusk Til Dawn, but, see, Wild Wild West still shares a vibe with Batman and Robin. A certain insouciant stupidity. You can dip in and out of both, moving from one to the other like a lover in a threesome who thought he would enjoy it but ends up deciding it’s weirdly boring and more work than he thought, and somehow not the sum of its parts. It’s a weird feeling, both the feeling of boredom in watching a giant mechanical spider destroy shit and the same apathy towards naked ladies doing sex stuff right in front of your eyes. These are points in life that make a person wonder whether they’ve seen everything they need to see. Perhaps there’s not much point in going on. If this doesn’t move the needle, what will?
Perhaps nothing. Perhaps nothing ever really did.
“Dr. Isley?” Woodrue frowned. “Pamela? You look great. Which seems like the right thing to say after I killed you like thirty seconds ago."
Woodrue was always a dreamer with a very skewed sense of his own attractiveness. He thought he might have a shot at Isley, even though she was much hotter now. And also even though he murdered her. Hey, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Maybe he managed to find the one woman whose fetish was being killed by an academic rival in a South American prison that was hastily turned into a science lab.
The woman who had once been Pamela Isley moved toward Woodrue. “Hello, Jason,” she said huskily, VERY huskily, in an almost cartoonish voice that must have been a bit of a surprise for everyone on set and would spark decades of debate as to whether Uma Thurman was the only person in this movie who knew what kind of movie she was in. “I think I’ve had a change of heart.”
Isley, never having a great sense of humor, kicked herself for not coming up with something more plant related. I’ve blossomed? No, too childish. Blast your stamen into my pistil? Too clinical, and “pistil” sounding like “pistol” kind of confuses the issue.
See this is why super smart people can’t get laid. They overthink everything.
Stunned by her beauty, thinking with his crotch, Woodrue didn’t attempt to move away as Isley leaned forward and kissed him delicately on the lips, the fifteenth most erogenous kissing zone according to a chart he was working on that JAMA had rejected several times on the basis of, “Dude, c’mon.”
“Quite literally a change of heart,” she went on, committing to the bit, even though it was a bad one. “I don’t think I’m human anymore. The animal-plant toxins seem to have had a rather unique effect on me that I seem to be able to explain pretty easily right now for the benefit of anyone curious as to what the hell is going on. Why show the change INSTEAD of telling? Why not do BOTH!?”
Woodrue suddenly felt light-headed. He heard Pamela’s words as if through a tank of water: “They replaced my blood with aloe and chlorophyll…and filled my lips with Venom. Butt, that’s still meat, baby. Sweet, delicious meat.”
Suddenly a bolt of pain stabbed through Woodrue. Cock first, then spreading out to the rest of his body.
He gasped and began to choke and fell to the floor, clutching at his groin.
“I probably should have mentioned this earlier,” Pamela told him. “I’m poison. Poison Ivy. Capitalized.” She waited a moment. It was always risky to go for a name change in the adult portion of your life. Maybe if you were a “Bobby” you could get people to start calling you Bob or Robert, but when you told your former coworker to stop calling you Pamela and to start calling you Poison Ivy, you were treading some choppy waters.
She reached out and sent a shelf of chemical beakers crashing to the floor, I guess forgetting that this is exactly what gave her superpowers like 2 minutes ago.
Casually, she tossed a flaming Bunsen burner on top of the spill, and sudden flames erupted.
“Let the flames touch the sky,” Poison Ivy intoned, but Jason Woodrue could no longer hear her. He was dead.
Well, why let that stop a perfectly good monologue?
“For I am Nature’s arm, her spirit, her will. The time has come for plants to take back the world so rightfully ours. Because it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.”
Begin Aside:
When I first read this, I figured it MUST be some kind of epic poem.
But it appears this is original material written for Batman and Robin.
However, there IS a series of commercials for margarine from the late 70s that include the phrase “It’s not nice to fool mother nature,” after which some grandma mincing around in the forest unleashes a stampeding elephant on someone because, I guess, they invented fake butter.
Is this speech a reference to these margarine commercials?
In a movie PACKED, JAMMED, RAMRODED with bad ideas, this has to be one of the most ill-advised. And that’s really saying something.
Who is this for? Why is this for?
End Aside.
A reflection caught Poison Ivy’s eye. She bent to pick up a broken beaker. On it, the easily recognizable logo of Wayne Enterprises was clearly visible. So that’s who’d been funding them. Or, possibly who had manufactured the beaker, the logo of things generally being the manufacturer, not the purchaser.
But Ivy wasn’t exactly worldly when it came to this stuff, cocooned as she was in her soft academic world of safe spaces and gender studies majors, and Ivy walked around the office making sure to write down an enemies list based on who must have been funding this research. Wayne Enterprises. Colgate, who put the toothpaste in the bathrooms, diabolically. Astro Glide, who made lubricants that were surprisingly helpful in a laboratory setting, get your mind out of the goddamn gutter.
Ivy frowned at the sound of Bane’s distant scream. Rustling was one thing, but distant screams were just SO annoying to her.
The flames were spreading; she could leave the monster Woodrue had created to perish in the fire along with several square miles of rainforest, which she was ostensibly protecting, but OH WELL.
Sure, she COULD leave this unthinking beast made from a South American prisoner who had committed god knows what crimes and now had the power to twist her head off of her body, turn her upside down and drink whatever sloughed out of her neck—she COULD leave him to perish in a fire. It might even be a mercy.
But…Bane might have other uses.
Poison Ivy turned and walked into the prison hall. “Coming, Bane,” she called sweetly. “We’ve got a plane to catch!”