Sweatin' to the Coldies

Yay. It's almost fucking July. My favorite fucking time of year. When I'm just about to drift off to sleep at night - naked, with the fan set on HI and set six inches away from the blubber puddle I ironically call my body - only to be jerked back from unconsciousness by the sound of a Piccolo Pete in the parking lot. Two to three months of humidity so dense that every time I take a shower, I never know when to stop drying myself off. The magical season where I need twenty extra minutes to get ready for work in the morning in order to smear the entire contents of a bottle of antiperspirant over every last centimeter of my skin. Have you sensed the sarcasm yet, or should I be more blunt? I fucking hate summer. 

I hate the heat. I feel like a hippo sitting in a bowl of clam chowder. I feel like I've been baked inside of a cake, and the humidity is a thick spread of buttercream frosting on top. I. Hate. The. Heat. I do not understand people who live for the summer, who love to sweat, who thrive on the sunlight. My hair stays in a tight bun for months - by the time I release it in autumn, it's grown six inches. I hate wearing jeans - they superglue themselves to my bloated thighs and strangle my flesh like sausage skin. My ankles swell up like little inner tubes floating on top of my shoes. I live on ice water, cold cheese, olives and macaroni salad from June to August. I need to move to fucking Reykjavik already. I could be happy in the grim, frostbitten eternal twilight of the extreme North for the rest of my fucking life. 

But alack and alas, it shall never come to pass. <--- That was a goddamned poem. Anyway, in lieu of an AC unit and/or a swimming pool, I keep a steady stream of snow-filled movies on hand to watch whilst I lay in bed at night, feeling like a pig in a coal pit. Does it cool me off? No, not really. But it beats standing in front of the freezer naked, rubbing myself with ice cubes and packages of frozen peas. 

The Terror - What I wouldn't give right about now to be stranded in the middle of a frozen ocean. Okay, not so much the lead poisoning or the cannibalism or the giant, pissed off Polar Bear God charging about, ripping people open like bean bags. I could also do without the crew of burly, hairy men who haven't bathed or seen a woman in two years. But hey, maybe they could make it like a cold version of Pirates of the Caribbean! Rent a room in a replica of The Terror! Pizza delivery via Husky sled! Free WiFi! Access to Crozier's liquor cabinet! Book a vacation on the eve of the solstice and take advantage of the Ice Carnival! All you can eat buffet in the Goodsir Dining Room! And for the 18+ crowd, we offer a midnight floor show featuring the "As A Boy" spectacle! Complimentary turndown service and free pillow turds available.

John Carpenter's The Thing - Well duh, like I wasn't going to include this - my all-time favorite horror movie ever, regardless of time of year. Shit, I think they ought to make this an amusement park attraction for horror aficionado's and sick fucks everywhere! Come to Antarctica! Spend your winter tied to the fucking couch! Daily blood tests and an endless supply of Jim Beam and bigass doobies! Play with our dogs and hope you don't get the one that explodes like a banana peel! Chess Wizard for everyone! Daily activities include putting out helicopter fires, being yelled at by Norwegians and playing with computers whose graphics predate Pong. At the end of your stay we'll be raffling off a severed human head with spider legs growing out of it! Amuse your friends and terrify would-be robbers with this handy pet who responds to basic commands such as: "You gotta be fucking kidding."

Pontypool - "Now, in our top story of today, a big, cold, dull, dark, white, empty, never-ending blow my brains out, seasonal affective disorder freaking kill me now weather-front, that'll last all day - or maybe - when the wind shifts later on, we'll get a little greenhouse gas relief from the industrial south."  Now see, Shock Jock DJ Grant Mazzy contradicts himself here. He admits to hating winter, but he also acknowledges the destructive presence of greenhouse emissions that are heating up our planet and destroying it. Maybe it's just Valentine's Day that's got him down. Frankly, I don't know what he's bitching about. He's got a good job in the basement of a church in rural Ontario, far away from 'Murrica and with ample access to both moose and maple syrup. So make up your mind, Grant. Die in a furnace of fossil fuel fumes in a dystopian future, or die in a blizzard, torn apart by zombies? At least you have a full bottle of Glenfiddich and two hot babes to keep you company in the latter scenario.

Until the Light Takes Us - There are plenty of shots of summer in this film, as green and sparkling and pure a summer as any loyal Norwegian could hope for. But the subject matter and the plentiful footage of snow frosted pines, icy walkways and steady rains of lacy snowflakes make this documentary about that coldest of music genres - black metal - that much colder. The word "cold" is used to describe so much in this flick: the classic black metal riff, the grim lyrics and demonic vocals, the album cover art, the murder of Euronymous as committed by Varg. Cold, frozen, freezing, grim, dark...it'd be a great drinking game to play along to this movie. Every time one of the aforementioned words is mentioned, drink. Every time Fenriz pulls a weird face, drink. Every time Varg says something pompous....well, no, scratch that last one. You'll die of alcohol poisoning before the film is five minutes old. 

Frostbitten - Sweden. Second only to Argentina when it comes to hiding ex-Nazi mad scientists, apparently. Where the sun is not seen for months and bored kids quoting Star Wars throw rave parties, turn into vampires via contaminated drugs and kill each other with lawn gnomes. This is 30 Days of Night, if that movie had a sense of humor and was tripping balls on hallucinogenics. It's Let The Right One In, if Oskar and Eli were about 5 years older with a penchant for Manic Panic and wardrobes courtesy of Hot Topic. It's also got a great looking master vampire who walks around totally naked, all wrinkly white skin, unhinged jaw, pointy ears and fruit bat face. This movie is so fucking nutzoid I can't possibly review it in less than 80 gabillion words. It's daylight for perhaps all of 0.3 seconds, the rest of the film taking place in complete darkness and mountainous snow drifts. 

Ravenous - Here's another great attraction: spend a weekend in an idyllic log cabin in the Northern California foothills, where the skiing is amazing, the view spectacular and the stews full of meat. There's just one catch - you have to harvest it yourself. Preferably from the obnoxious tourists whose paths you can cross on a pleasant amble through the breathtaking forests and snowy hills. Cozy fires and ice cold baths in the nearby river await you. There's weed and bourbon aplenty. It's Eat or be Eaten at our Ravenous weekend getaway. But please don't lick the sleeping guests. 

And because I can never think of a clever way to wrap up my articles, I stole the following post from Gavin Baddeley's facebook page. Gavin lives in Merry Old England, where temps yesterday soared to an insufferable 93 degrees. The post was incredibly well-timed and summed up perfectly my own feelings about the weather:

"I hate summer. And I'm not alone. Summertime in urban areas is riot-time, tourist-time, pollution-time and psycho-time. In rural areas it's mosquito-time, sunburn/heatstroke-time, pollen-time, litter-time, boredom-time, vandal-time, and gangbang-time. There's no worse time for tragedy than the sticky heat of summer, or for frantic attempts at pleasure. Christmas "joy" is an odious duty, but summer "gaiety" is a maladroit ritual performed with calculated chaos.

Persons of refinement prefer the other seasons, which progress through their days less heavy-footedly. Despite nature's tantrums during other seasons, be they storms, floods, ice or snow— man has made summer his personal disaster season. Taking the warmth nature has provided, he has fashioned for himself an environment where his mindlessness flourishes most. It is the only season which validates slobs. Those who have found civilized behavior repugnant the rest of the year can celebrate their boorishness in grand style. I would enjoy spring more were it not for the impending plague of summer with its human locusts thriving in an atmosphere far deadlier (if radiation levels are considered) than the worst blizzards. Other seasons may be violent in themselves, but summer is virulent, an incubator for personal malaise and discord."

SUMMERTIME ~ Anton LaVey

The Cost of Lies

Just over a year ago, I wrote these words as a preface to an incredibly overdue review: "The amount of writing I do is directly proportionate to the amount of inspiration I receive." The review in question was for the miniseries The Terror, starring Jared Harris and Adam Nagaitis, a frostbitten nightmare that restored my faith in the horror genre. 

It's been fourteen months since The Terror ran its course, and just as my newly restored hope was beginning to flag once more, along came Jared Harris and Adam Nagaitis to rescue me from stagnation yet again. And although the five part miniseries Chernobyl, chronicling (obviously) the meltdown of Russia's Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986 is classified as a "historical drama", I call bullshit. This is pure horror, through and through.

I was sixteen years old when reports started popping up on our tiny TV set about an explosion in the faraway country of Russia, our bitter cold war enemy only recently softened by Sting the year before with his somber ballad "Russians." I remember a handful of images: ashen faced anchormen, stock footage of cooling towers, grainy images of smoking rubble. By the time it had happened, it was all over. That's what we thought, anyway. At sixteen, I was more concerned about boys and clothes and fitting in to worry about stuff happening on the other side of the world. The enormity of what had occurred never really hit me, not even as years went by and photos of mutated wildlife emerged, documentaries were released portraying the blasted aftermath of Pripyat and stories of the Elephant's Foot captured the imaginations of legend trippers everywhere. 

Nagaitis & Buckley as Vasily & Lyudmilla

Opening like any other haunted house or slasher film, we're introduced to a young married couple in the middle of the night. Lyudmilla, with her sunny halo of curly blonde hair, moves quietly through the small apartment while her husband, Vasily, sleeps. The concrete high rise they inhabit in the small village of Pripyat is no Candyman-esque Cabrini Green: it's green and tree-lined with parks for the children to play in. Lyudmilla, newly pregnant, has no reason to believe that their future will be anything but normal. But we've been looking out of the living room window for several seconds now, seeing what Lyudmilla hasn't yet noticed - a faraway glow hovering ominously over the distant sleeping god of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. When the distant explosion finally slams into the Pripyat apartment building, we've already realized what Lyudmilla is about to learn: Spring is over, nuclear winter is here. 

There's no monster present, no boogeyman visible to the naked eye stalking our protagonists. The arrogant pigheadedness of Chernobyl's plant directors - in particular, Anatoly Dyatlov's cruel, smug face as played by Paul Ritter will have you itching to slap him hard with a tire iron about 60 times in a row, or until your arm starts hurting - aren't even the primary antagonists here. They're just stubborn and stupid, the masks worn by the true killer lurking in the ruins. The monster is the toxic black smoke billowing from the blasted hole where once a core stood and functioned sanely, now swallowing helicopters whole and spitting them out to fall like discarded bones to the ground below. It waits in the glistening chunks of graphite littering the ground which, when touched, consumes the flesh of good men like flame eating up a sheet of paper. It is in the air and the rains of ash, seeding the clouds with cancer. It is in the water, insidiously threatening to slowly poison the very sea itself. It haunts the faces of Jared Harris's empathetic scientist Valery Legasov and stern Yes Man Boris Shcherbina, whose facade quickly crumbles in the face of Chernobyl's ruin. These two men, initially at odds but swiftly united by horror

and later joined by Emily Watson's amalgam of nuclear experts Ulana Khomyuk, become the Hammer vampire hunters, determined to rid the country of the scourge that has descended upon it, even at the cost of their own lives. 

This is when the version of Russia we've always been sold moves into view: stiff, formal and unforgiving officials in crisp suits, incapable of smiling, barking not only orders but demands, stubbornly insisting that no such thing could ever happen in Mother Russia, therefore it hasn't. KGB agents and soldiers with guns think they can deny the presence of radiation in their country by simply refusing to acknowledge its existence. Until, suddenly, they have to. The swift descent through the defcon levels is headdesk worthy: 1 - There is no problem. 2 - Okay, there may be a problem but it's contained. 3 - Okay, it may be a bit worse than we initially thought. 4 - Uh, we may have a problem here. 5 - Fuck, we're all going to die. 

By the time the severity of the situation is finally acknowledged, it's damn near too late. The first responders to the explosion - including Nagaitis's firefighter Vasily - have been isolated in a Moscow hospital where they are rapidly disintegrating into pools of open sores and jellied fluids. Sweet and sunny Lyudmilla can only stand by and watch as her husband literally melts to death in front of her. Either ignorant of or not concerned about her own exposure, she dons no protective gear and we're left to wait and wonder about the fate of her unborn child, which Vasily will never meet. 

But how do you fight what you cannot see? Monetary rewards and compensation are offered to the "volunteers" sent in to wade through the poisoned waters below the plant and shut off potentially explosive machinery. Miners are ordered to battle the encroaching beast in the boiling underground, which they do. Totally naked. And fully aware of the fact that they will all die, uncompensated and uncared for, but so absolutely badass that they cannot  - will not - refuse. Green young boys are quickly put to work on the animal killing squads in an episode that gave me a full blown, sobbing-like-a-bitch panic attack, as puppies and kittens and docile livestock are lured out into the open with friendly summons and quickly executed in an attempt to keep mutations from spreading. The deaths of the animals are not shown on screen (for those of you who cannot bear such horror, like me) and it's an understandable, necessary evil, one which quickly transforms the kid who carries it out into a hard, cold soldier, all innocence destroyed. The victims of Chernobyl were not just the ones who died in the immediate aftermath. Indeed, the mutations spread regardless of the best efforts to contain it - mutations of hope and happiness into sorrow and grief.

There's no happy ending here, and we're told as much in the pre-credit sequence. But if you needed a pre-credit sequence to tell you as much, you probably were as ignorant as I was of the massive scale of this incident, which isn't over and never will be. Not in our lifetimes, not in our grandchildren's either. There is simply no way to accurately describe the horror of Chernobyl, nor are there enough words in any written language to properly describe it. Chernobyl isn't a dry report, or a necessary chapter read as an assignment. It's visceral. You have to feel it and absorb it, let it sicken you and change your DNA. And the combined efforts of series creator Craig Mazin, director Johan Renck and the entire cast - Jared Harris, Adam Nagaitis (who is quickly ascending my short list of favorite actors, right beneath Sean Harris), Stellan Skarsgard, Emily Watson, Jessie Buckley, Paul Ritter, and so many others (including a few familiar faces from Game Of Thrones) - really slam the reality of the events into our faces like a searing handful of toxic graphite. And this is why I classify it as true horror: it burns, it hurts, it scars and disfigures. If you are still the same person you were after watching Chernobyl as you were before watching it, please question your humanity.