Phantoms

The effect of style achieved by rapid-fire citations from science-fiction films by the dozen, including Alien, The Andromeda Strain and The Thing, is to take the mickey out of the film’s basis in the Monty Python number about an outer space blancmange turning Englishmen into Scotsmen who head North, leaving England vacant and thus giving the blancmange a shot at Wimbledon. It is eaten on the court by an English couple, with spoons.

There is another joke that applies as well. A student in the back row of a college class on Hemingway does no work all semester, is helpless when called upon but still somehow passes the course. When asked how he did it, the student explains, “The scum also rises.”