Entertainment
The R-Rated, Extremely Graphic Thriller That's A Sadistic Game Of Cat And Mouse
By Robert Scucci
| Published
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but that’s physically impossible in 2008’s Bone Dry, a chase thriller set entirely in the punishing desert. The marketing ahead of the film’s release pitches the viewing experience as “Deliverance meets Duel,” but if anything, it reminds me of another low-budget film called Drifter that came out the same year. The main difference between the two films is that Drifter leans more into the Saw film series, with a group of people waking up in the desert and being forced to endure a series of challenges if they want to survive.
In Bone Dry, on the other hand, we’re introduced to a man being hunted by a ruthless antagonist who seems to be having just a little too much fun torturing him as hours turn into days under the brutal desert sun. Funny enough, and this is a pattern I’ve noticed in a lot of low-budget movies, both films feature protagonists dressed in business-casual attire. I’m not sure if this is meant to make them appear more legitimate, or to drive home the point that wearing synthetic fabric blends in the middle of a heat wave is about as unpleasant as it gets.
Though there are conflicting reports on how much it cost writer-director Brett A. Hart to film Bone Dry, it’s clearly a low-budget effort, with estimates suggesting it probably cost around a million dollars, potentially topping out closer to $5 million. Fortunately, those limitations don’t really show on screen because the on-location shooting does most of the visual heavy lifting for this particular game of cat and mouse.
Two Guys And A Gun, Having All Sorts Of Fun
Like most survival or chase thrillers, there’s really not much to Bone Dry, and that’s the point. The less you know about it, the better.
Here’s what you absolutely need to know before deciding if it’s the next thing you fire up on Tubi. A man named Eddie (Luke Goss) is chased through the desert by a psychopath named Jimmy (Lance Henriksen). Jimmy gets a sick thrill out of torturing Eddie, giving him just enough water to survive along with very simple instructions to keep walking North or be executed. Along the way, Eddie is subjected to Jimmy’s sadistic machinations, which include being knocked unconscious and handcuffed naked to a very tall cactus, buried up to his neck in hot, rocky sand, and given water bottles that turn out to be filled with salt water.
As time passes, Eddie becomes increasingly delirious, but through his hallucinations we catch glimpses of the backstory that brought these two men together in the first place. It slowly becomes clear that Jimmy has a personal vendetta against Eddie, for reasons that aren’t yet clear to Eddie, making the hunter’s motives all the more menacing.
A Low-Budget, But Very Resourceful Thriller
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan once said that the real star of the show was Albuquerque, New Mexico. Some of the series’ best shots come from the rolling clouds, hazy sun, and thick air. Bone Dry, which was filmed on location across desert regions in California, Utah, and Arizona, boasts a similar aesthetic, but it’s the only aesthetic it boasts. There are no city streets or sound stages here, just the pure, punishing heat of an unforgiving desert landscape.
While the conflict is immediately clear in Bone Dry, the film escalates smoothly as we learn more about its two principal characters. The stakes remain largely the same throughout, but your perception of each man evolves along the way, making for an engaging watch.
The only real bone I have to pick with the film is minor, and when you consider the budget, probably inevitable. Eddie wanders through the desert for days, sustains a significant number of injuries, and just keeps going. In real life, I imagine he’d be reduced to a walking boil after a single day, especially after the cactus scene, but he keeps pushing forward. I’m not a huge fan of hyper-realistic gore, so this was actually a relief, but if you’re watching Bone Dry for realism, you’ll need to suspend some disbelief.
The real story is about the two men, the hunt, and the inciting incident that brought them together in the first place. If you want to find out what that incident is, all you have to do is fire up Bone Dry on Tubi, where it’s streaming for free.
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 29
It may appear full, but the Moon isn’t actually at 100% illumination yet. In fact, we’re still a couple of days away. But it’s still big and bright enough to do some moon gazing, so keep reading to find out what features you might be able to see tonight.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Wednesday, April 29, the Moon phase is Waxing Gibbous. Tonight, 94% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Without any visual aids, tonight you should be able to see the Mares Vaproum, Tranquillitatis, and Imbrium. With binoculars, you’ll see the Mare Frigoris, Clavius Crater, and the Alphonsus Crater. And, finally, with a telescope you’ll see all this plus the Apollo 17 landing spot, Rima Ariadaeus, and the Fra Mauro Highlands.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
According to NASA, the Moon takes roughly 29.5 days to circle Earth once, going through eight distinct phases in the process. Even though we always see the same side of the Moon, the amount of sunlight hitting it changes as it moves in its orbit. The shifting light creates the changing shapes we know as full, half, and crescent Moons. Altogether, there are eight main lunar phases.
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Entertainment
The ASUS TUF Gaming F16 gaming laptop is down to a record-low price at Amazon — now $400 off
TL;DR: Amazon has the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 gaming laptop on sale for $899.99, down from its $1,299.99 list price. That saves you $400 on a 2025 gaming laptop with an Intel Core i5-13450HX processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 graphics, 16GB of DDR5 memory, and a 165Hz FHD+ display.
$899.99
at Amazon
$1,299.99
Save $400
Finding a current-gen gaming laptop in today’s economy for under $1,000 is already amazing, but Amazon’s latest ASUS deal is offering you an all-time low bargain.
As of April 28, the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 gaming laptop is on sale for $899.99 at Amazon, marked down from $1,299.99. Price tracker camelcamelcamel has confirmed that this is the lowest-ever price for this gaming laptop.
For that price, you’re getting the RTX 5050 and Intel Core i5 version of the TUF Gaming F16, which is built around an Intel Core i5-13450HX processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU. It also comes with 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD, so it should be nicely suited for jumping between games, school work, everyday browsing, and plenty of tabs without causing your sessions to come to a sudden crash.
With those sorts of specs, this version of the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 lets you comfortably run games from the latest graphically demanding titles — including Crimson Desert, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Pragmata.
Mashable Deals
The 16-inch FHD+ display is a big part of the appeal, with ASUS’s fitted 165Hz 16:10 panel with 100% sRGB color giving you extra vertical space compared to a standard 16:9 screen while keeping motion smoother in fast-paced games like Fortnite and Counter-Strike 2. The handy Adaptive-Sync also helps cut down on stuttering and screen tearing when your frame rate starts shifting during intense firefights or brawls with lots of assets moving around at the same time.
Mashable Deals
The TUF Gaming F16 keeps the series’ usual more rugged angle, as well. ASUS has had the laptop tested to MIL-STD-810H standards, while its 2nd Gen Arc Flow Fans, full-width heatsink, and full-width vent are designed to help keep performance steady without making the machine unnecessarily loud.
If you’re after a laptop that’s more for work than gaming, Samsung’s ultra-sleek Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 just got a $450 price cut.
Entertainment
Beloved Star Trek Character Busted Franchise’s Biggest Myth With Single Line
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Star Trek has some of the most passionate fans on the entire planet. For the most part, those fans are unified in their love for this decades-old sci-fi franchise. However, there are a few things the fandom has bitterly debated over the years. One of the most intense arguments involves a seemingly innocuous question: can Vulcans lie? Some fans are convinced that these logic-loving aliens are far too moral and upstanding to deceive anybody. Other fans believe Vulcans are fully capable of lying and have successfully convinced the galaxy that they always tell the truth.
This persistent Star Trek myth goes back to The Original Series and claims made by characters like Spock and Dr. McCoy. Eventually, this myth was busted by Tuvok, who reluctantly told Seven of Nine that Vulcans were capable of lying but generally preferred not to do so. After decades of fan debate, this finally settled the matter. However, what most fans don’t know is that Tuvok accidentally busted this myth far earlier in the show. In “Twisted,” he blatantly lies to Captain Janeway in a scripted exchange that seriously upset Tuvok actor Tim Russ.
The Man, The Myth
First, we need to talk about how the “Vulcans don’t lie” myth came about. Back in The Original Series episode, “The Enterprise Incident,” a Romulan commander asks Spock if it’s true that Vulcans can’t lie, and Spock responds, “It is no myth.” This idea is also backed up by Dr. McCoy, who offered his medical opinion on the matter in “The Menagerie, Part 1” when he says of Spock, “the simple fact that he’s a Vulcan means he’s incapable of telling a lie.” Even the android Data agrees. In the Next Generation episode, “Data’s Day,” he wrote a message to Bruce Maddox about how Vulcans couldn’t lie.
If you pay close attention, though, Spock himself sometimes justified telling blatant lies. In The Wrath of Khan, when Saavik realizes Spock told Kirk that Enterprise repairs would take longer than they did, she confronts him: “You lied!” Spock (who was speaking in code to Kirk) simply replies, “I exaggerated.” In The Undiscovered Country, his apprentice, Valeris, does something similar. When asked to name her fellow Starfleet traitors, she says she does not remember. When Spock asks, “A lie?”, she responds, “A choice.”
A Secret Onscreen Lie
When he began working on Star Trek: Voyager, Tuvok actor Tim Russ seemingly bought into the idea that Vulcans don’t lie. In an interview with Cinefantastique, the actor discussed some dialogue from the episode “Twisted” that he disagreed with. “There’s a line in an episode we just finished, ‘I’ve always respected the Captain’s decisions.’ And that line was difficult to say.” Elaborating, he said, “[The] line was difficult to say when, in fact, we know he […] violated protocols [in ‘Prime Factors’] by taking matters into his own hands.” He’s referring to an earlier incident where Tuvok traded Starfleet technology to aliens for technology that could transport the Voyager crew 40,000 light-years.
To those closely watching Star Trek: Voyager, this settled the old debate: Vulcans can lie, as we saw Tuvok do to Captain Janeway. On other occasions, Tuvok has found ways to (like Spock before him) justify his deception. After he tells Chakotay, “As a Vulcan, I am at all times honest,” the commander says that Tuvok clearly lied when he passed himself off as a loyal member of the Maquis. Tuvok replies, “I was honest to my own convictions within the defined parameters of my mission.” To this Vulcan, it seems, lies are in the eye of the beholder.
A Borg Assimilates The Truth
Later, Star Trek: Voyager would bust this old franchise myth in a much more blatant way. In the episode “Hunters,” Seven of Nine asks, point-blank, if Vulcans can lie. Tuvok reluctantly admits to her that Vulcans have the capability of lying, but that he has never found it useful or necessary. Given Tuvok’s previous moral flexibility, this information might square the circle with the line about always respecting Janeway’s decision. In Tuvok’s mind, he may respect her decision without following it.
With any luck, this helps settle the debate, once and for all. Vulcans can lie. They just mostly choose not to do so. This explains what they are capable of while also explaining their reputation for honesty. If nobody ever sees you lying, why would they doubt you are honest? If you doubt what I’ve written, though, you can always wait until First Contact Day and ask the first Vulcan you see about all this. Don’t worry: I’m sure he’ll tell the truth!
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