When you’re just dying to get on to television. Oh and the human centipede.

If I was one of the hard-core Emo kids I’d be going spare right now.  Honestly, if you harbour an honest pretention for years that only the cool dark gothic types like Edgar Allen Poe or Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker could really reach your cold, dark misunderstood soul.  And then suddenly, you can’t  turn on a movie without  falling over the undead, or turn on the TV without some cool attractive teenagers walking out of a lake - even the kids that wash or at least don’t wear long stripey socks are into the undead right now.   Twilight, Being Human, Vampire Diaries, True Blood, Blood Ties, Vampire High, the list seems to be getting endless.  And what do the Emo Kids turn to now?  Particularly since My Chemical Romance got all crappy and sold out.

Not obvious.  At all.

Anyway, don’t get me wrong, I like a vampire now and again

Buffy was a truly good show.  Not just for the obvious reasons either.

What really gets me is the laziness of whoever’s commissioning this ever increasing number of programmes featuring the dead, the undead, the back from the dead, and the not dead but gets angry and unpleasant at a certain time of the month.   I mean werewolves, clearly.   [obvious joke removed]

I presume it’s not a lack of imagination on the writer’s side.

Writer: “Hey chief, got a new show idea for you”

Executive:  “Cool.  How many vampires?”

Or worse.

Meeting:

Exec 1: “Ladies and Gents, we’ve done some extensive market research.  The current downward economic cycle, polictical instability and personal uncertainty is leading to a new-fatalism within our target demographics.  They want something that taps into that dark zeitgeist.

So having looked at what our competitors do, vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts etc, we’ve come up with a totally new angle which meets both our target audience needs and targets our competitor share of the audience.

“It’s going to be based around a group of young, cool, good-looking vampires.”

Exec2: “But that’s what everyone is doing”

Exec1: “Yes, but ours will be wearing hats.”

And finally….The Human Centipede

I’d never heard of a horror film genre called “body shock” but it’s apparently trying new and foul ways to make you feel sick or something. (Jeez these guys should try eating at Chiquito’s which I might suggest is a marginally less costly but 100% more effective way of provoking nausea).

But I finally saw the film Human Centipede on the weekend.  The premise is foul and I won’t explain here, and parts are pretty hard to sit through – excruciating by being both disgusting and staggeringly poor at the same time.  

My major beef is that this type of film for me looks to provoke a singular human response. “It’s sick” cries the Director.  We go home feeling sick.  Well done.

I’d rather not be told what I should be feeling during and after a film and the best films surely aim higher in looking to provoke the whole range of human responses, sometimes at the same time and quite often with ambiguity.   See Schindler’s List if you want to be truly disgusted.  And no-one’s sewing someone’s bum to someone else’s face.  Which takes me back to Chiquito’s….