In a war-torn muddy de-saturated field, an actor in transition from playing a Roman to following in the footsteps of Dolph Lundgren and Thomas Jane leads a ragtag bunch of soap-opera and sitcom actors and one particularly ugly Yank, all of whom are luckily wearing their personalities quite literally on their sleeves (okay, the armies they defected from, but you can pretty much guess the Frog’s a coward, the ‘Merican’s a dick, and the Scot’s an extra from Spaced making him the single greatest thing ever to wear a beard). They are led there by a three-decades-strong character actor and a first-time writer-director team. Their goal, a mysterious bunker. Whoops, that title’s taken. It’s an Outpost. Sorted.

 

The good:

 

The actors make a good fist of their roles and although pencil-sketch characters don’t come across as complete cannon fodder. In other words you miss ‘em when they’re gone. Filmed in what looks like DV, it’s got quick and dirty Shaving Ryan’s Privates sepia-style shooting and some excellent, incredibly simple lighting – most characters carry fluorescent sticks that light themselves and their surroundings eerily but logically. The night sky is a bit too helpful in showing us the goings-on after dark but apart from that there’s very little cheating. And the limited light allows for a lot of effective scares. The director also tries not to make the film too straightforward either in direction or execution - looks good, sounds GREAT (though made my teeth wince), and is a poster-child for not letting budgetary constraints make you use unrendered CGI golden sabre-tooth teeth.

 

The bad:

 

The plot is a fucking mess cadged from a Charles Berlitz book and rammed into the abortive attempt of a film, The Bunker. The understandably-baffled mercs weren’t the only ones confused by some babble about Einstein’s Unified Field theory, the set-up of which crashed and burned when Basil Exposition explained a machine funneled these unified fields into a chamber. What they WANTED to give us in the film were soldiers akin to those Berlitz talked about, phasing in and out of reality at will. What we GOT was a messy mixture of corpses, zombies and ghosts. The rulebook for the enemy in this film was pissed on by a syphilitic dog and buried in peat leaving us baffled as to the wherefores and whys and exactly when doors and wires matter and the end, using more unified-field-rays to do… something, though where half the budget went is still a big dose of say-what-now?

 

Okay, we’ve had the undead, we’ve had restless souls, we’ve had Nazi experiments and we’ve had occult summonings of demons. From Der Totenkorps to Hellboy there’s no end to fun to be had with zombie Nazis and god bless this film for taking a different tack but trying to cram serious hypothetical science into the background of what is basically a Dog Soldiers set-up just didn’t work. That film got it right: “We is soldiers, they is werewolves, on with the fun”. Here it’s “This is science, they is… um… stabbing me, on with the credits?”. And under all this flowed a few nice similes that barely bobbed to the surface, suggesting too many good ideas were thrown in the hat then the hat was crammed on the director’s head and he ran about with ideas trickling stickily down his forehead like overripe cheese. Poor head-cheesy man.

 

So, Outpost – good film, but could be much better. Probably better than the past attempts, the Bunker (withdrawn hurt as it didn’t actually manage to become a finished film) and Deathwatch (in which only Andy Serkis was interesting). But it’s no Shockwaves.

Harking back to my blinkering-fringe-baiting of the other week, here’s another great headline:

 

 

And god bless the quote-farming journos who actually managed to persuade some floppy-haired androgyne (doubtless amidst shrugs, stutters, and overuse of the words “like” and “nuffin’”to state:

All together now class, say it proud: “Just Like Everybody Else”. Well done, team effort.

And of course, when the poor ink-thumbed journos are done baiting the wannabe My Chemical Roflmao chavs, they gleefully point out the coroner blames The Damnable Internet for the whole silly affair.

 

"She (the panda-eyed ex-parrot) had become an aficionado of the emo fad and she was a user of the internet, which enabled her to contact other emos all over the world, in particular America.

 

…because American emos are the worst. And the fattest. And since when do people describe the World Wide Wub as a drug? She became a user, plugging the modem cable straight into her artery and mainlining cats with captions right into her tiny heart. Oh yes, the first meme is free, they say, but soon you’re collapsed in a huddle behind a rack of PCs with two geeks swordfighting with their acne-sprinkled shafts deep in your throat just t oafford you another hit of misheard lyrics from Youtube. And then you will die.

 

And the punchline to the whole hand-wringing article? The reason that I love perching atop my fortified moral Masada slinging poop at the rallying urchins below?

This seriously needs to be narrated by someone. Leonard Nimoy, say. “And the danger… OF EMO. Good night”. It’d be glorious. The only problem is, what more can a starving quiff-flicking pre-teen with a too-tight Fallout Boy t-shirt want than Mumsy reading that their new hair-dye fad is dangerous? I mean one day you’re sneakily exchanging your Barbies for Bratz and Googling “ladyboy” for wank fodder, next you’re locked in your room while there’s a ritualistic burning of everything darker than lilac in your wardrobe going on in the garden? It’s every moist-crotched fantasy come true, bar the NPH-on-a-unicorn-riding-in-to-save-me one but it’ll happen, OH YES.

The Point Possibly Is, the media get Ma and Pa suburbia up in arms, their kids get a welcome injection of oppression, the fad expands, more kids take the piñata route and end up wind-chimes for folks to find under nominally-tragic circumstances, and the media gets to be even more stern and jowl-wobbly. Then the debate will switch to whether media involvement causes the crazes, beardies will lecture on current affairs shows and the machine will slowly rumble on over the bodies of the dead like some yellow-paper Panzer tank charging for the horizon, with no-one at the wheel and blood on its tracks.

…dammit, that little bit of pop-psychology almost suggests I care. Please understand I don’t really give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut that media is a self-serving and self-perpetuating system, nor do I fuss overly at this tendency for small waifs and strays to go tits up over emotive wankcore. In fact, I don’t really have an invested interest in any of this jazz, I just like jumping up and down and pointing at the freaks and lepers like those middle-class twits who’d go laugh at the crazies at St Bethlehem’s. Teehee, see the dancing freaks. Dance, freaks, dance! La la la…

Right, as you were. I’m not paying you to piss around in the internet.

Thank you Mister Darwin.

 

A few delightful snippets from the Times today:

 

Ah, these crazy emotional kids with their songs about death and depression. Given pretty much every fat-bint-in-a-frock opera is about the same thing one wonders of the death tolls in the la-di-dah showboating brigade. And I am now imagining undead emo Pavarotti and it scares me. Never mind, more importantly, who arranges initiation into being “emotional”? Is there a ceremony? Does it involve the bestowing of the sacred Nightmare Before Christmas bag and the “Big Book Of No-one-understands-me-but-my-pencil-sharpener”? Is there cake?

 

Aaanyway, fictional people in my mind sometimes ask me why I don’t want to have children, and I reply (if no-one’s watching) that children are retards. I know I should be sad for this wee poppet’s lost life sacrificed on the altar of My Chemical Cancer Haircut, or her distraught family, but all I think is “yay, one less sulking twat getting underfoot on the Underground”. So really, I’m kinda glad she’s dead. Does that make me a bad person?   

Then:

 

Interviewer asks me “what is something about you that’s not on your CV?”

 

I answered (thinking I didn’t want and wouldn’t get this job) “one of the things that brought me to England was the vast number of gigs as I do amateur gig photography and this seems like a great place for it”.

 

No, I can’t remember exactly why I picked that example. Probably it was truthful and didn’t mention boobies.

 

Now:

 

(Fast forward through half a dozen Bitburger beers with the boss instead of lunch)

 

“So, photographed any good bands yet?”

 

Me, taken aback, “Well, I was working on getting a press pass for a band DUST, who are opening for Unheilig”

 

“Ah, so I take it they’re very heavy metal?”

 

Me, even more taken aback, “Ummm, Neue Deutsche Harte, yeah, like Rammstein” hoping for a blank face and for my manager to wander off.

 

“Oh, Rammstein" says my boss, “they’re funny, they remind me of a band I used to be into, Laibach…”

 

 

Early days yet, but I think I’m going to like it here. But that might be because I’m fuzzily drunk and can’t use my index fingers so am typing with 6 fingers and my thumbs. And the office closes in 14 minutes. Huzzah!

Ah, fatties. I was discussing them recently, with someone who was of the view its 100% your-own-damned-fault that you’re a chubby-mc-chubchub. Interestingly I hear that from some people who will in the same vitriolic breath bitch about a girl for being rake-thin as “it’s because she’s got a fast metabolism, it’s not fair, wah”. We appreciate thinness and so get tall-poppyish and catty with our slender reeds, but revel in the fact obesity is self-inflicted and so can mock the tubby with impunity. In reality weight is about half nature, half nurture – yeah, greaseball-burgers morning noon and night will make you a butterball but I’ve fed scrawny piteous people liquid lard to see if it’d register and they go on being ambulatory x-rays with xylophones stuffed up their jumpers, while others look twice at a lettuce leaf and spontaneously swell up like a zeppelin. And my pear-shaped figure has remained pretty much constant through famine and feast, and I’ve dragged the same puku across the line of the Auckland marathon as I did out of bed after four months off sports for a smashed knee.

 

Which means the following statement is not just bitchy and hypocritical, it is written with me full-well knowing it’s wrong. But I want to say it so nyah.

 

American laws to prevent discrimination against fatties because of their “disability”, one that can be fixed just by pausing for breath between epic pie-hole-stuffing missions, is the equivalent of me adopting blackface and demanding recompense for being an oppressed African American. Or sitting in my wheelchair and demanding a better parking space. Or sticking two balloons up my top and whining about the mistreatment of women. Fact is, the boot-polish washes off and the balloons will deflate and I can stand the fuck up and I’m back where I was, all five ten of perfectly-formed Aryan manmeat running the planet.

 

Frankly if I was part of a single minority, be it racial, sexual, political, whatever, that had been persecuted due to something they Could Not Change, some fried-cheese-eatin’ motherfucker in stretch pants drowning their sorrows in an Oreo smoothie with cholesterol on top would probably piss me off and make me hold ‘em upside down (maybe using a forklift or similar?). so they are suffocated by their own rolls of flub. And hey, I can profit from all the spare change that falls out the cracks, because there’s one thing every minority likes, it’s a handoutdammit, I almost got to the end of this without making that joke. But at least I didn’t jest about dark-skinned people and cripples being panhandlers while women are all just gold-diggers as that’d just be way too harsh. Whew, dodged that bullet.

 

Wait, what?

“GTA IV – First Victim” trumpets the headline in The Times. Apparently some scallywag knifed another while in a line to buy this much-heralded new game. This attack has already been cited by commentators as “proof” the game inspires violence.

 

Of course it actually shows we’re consumer whores with poor impulse control, but one cannot accurately equate the stabbing with the effects of the game. The stabber, of course, not having been exposed to it yet. In fact the only fact that one can derive from this bit of queue-culling is that lack of GTA IV makes people violent. Therefore making this new game some form of soothing influence on the Play-stationing chav scum.

 

…if nothing else it’ll keep ‘em indoors and the fuck away from me…

Rounding the corner...

 

Okay, it's been a bipolar few weeks, cyclic whoopee and woe in a delightful lunch-loosening roller-coaster of Things Wot Need Doing and Things Wot Are Fun. And yesterday was probably the first time that the wheeee outweighed the wah.

 

Don't get me wrong, there have been shining beacons of yippee and indeed skippee these past few weeks – the DIY movie marathon (with bacon for breakfast) was a delight, with such horrors as Night Fright (sorry) and The Children (cut emo kids hands off for justice!) and the Earth Dies Screaming which lacked screaming due to the British stiff-upper-lip attitude towards earthly death, namely a slightly affronted "deary me". And Tauranga hijinks with the pools and the lap-dances and the Ginger Jellybean pools and the pools and the you get the idea. And the monotony of vacuuming broken up by ice cream. And people giving me food. But these things were somewhat overrun by conniving landlords, incompetent movers, lying shippers, annoying colleagues, expanding waistlines, awkward family moments, and not having a damned thing to play with (yes yes, "penis" ha hah shuttup). It's being trapped in the waiting-room part of my plan with only out-of-date Hello! Magazines to masturbate over. But finally I turned the corner, having cleaned my last clean and washed my last window, then being fed sushi until it came out green. Finally the stuff falling on my head is more sunshine than urine. Hell, I even got hammered enough to jest through my company luncheon – and bonus points for my quiet, apologetic manager who knows full well he lied through his teeth about his dynamic team just to get me to work for him, for stumping up cigars as my farewell present. What a nice chap. Now I have soirees, drinkies, weddings, movies, familial obligations, jumping-up-and-down-on-suitcases, economy-class travel and finally, sex to look forward to. And nary a scrubbing brush to darken my doorstep.

 

...and if you type "Mohammed" into Google Images , you get a crapload of hits. Them thar fundamentalist fucksticks are going to have a hell of a time cleansing the world of all that idolatry-fodder. Poor saps. Who, given their vastly twitchy behaviour, should probably be left alone and not be poked with sticks. Or hotdogs. Or Danish cartoons. That's not to say they're not somewhere on the scale between a tiny bit of poo that gets caught in the curly hairs of some convicted goat-fuckers arse then is removed by some toothless salad-tosser desperately trying to save his last remaining nut... and oh, Roland Emmerich. But until such time as my life is made better by doodling Mohammed on a napkin of whatever, I'll let sleeping dags lie. That said, on the day it is Vastly Necessary for me to get my scribbling on, fuck those closed-minded psychotic bomb-chuckers, I'm making with the pretty pictures and damn the torpedoes.

 

Right, onwards.

The patronising bitch Skynet HAL 9000 Telecom fuck-machine which fields calls to the 123 number needs a slap upside it's Fool Head for being a gloating brain-in-a-box turd-burglar. With it's beyond the valley of the Uneasy Dolls "Tell me your problems" sultry tones, followed by it's "WTF mate I don't understand you" as I enunciate at increasing volumes that I want to disconnect my phone line and my life much to the merriment of the Mormon Morons around me... Then it reminds me that if it can't understand my blithering I can always use the touchtone keypaddle button-mash interface. So I select that and get a spiel, a fucking spiel about how happy most Telecom customers are with shouting at the I-come-from-sodomy coquettish cocktease recorded dame, and how it, she, and everyone hopes that next time I'll try to use that interface as opposed to somehow lowering the tone by using my greasy fingers to do the walking. I don't know if the twat was miffed I wouldn't talk to her despite her giving me the cold shoulder, or thinks I'm an inferior male because I can't communicate but either way I will some day introduce her to something I was lectured about at length yesterday, the concept of the "hatefuck". Which replaces "chokefuck" in my vocabulary as "term most likely to be written on planet's gravestone". You hear me NOW, you silicon Jezebel? I'll teach you to snub me. Oh yes.

 

Oh yes, too much caffeine and candy, not enough fresh air and food. Gweeee...