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that fuzzy feeling in the brain
Thursday, April 15 1999
On Kim's good advice, I simply ignored the alarm when it went off this morning. I ended up sleeping until 8:00AM, when I should have been at work. I asked Kim if she needed the car for anything today and was surprised to find that she didn't. It wasn't especially difficult to convince her to let me use the car.
All day at work I had that fuzzy feeling in my head that suggested high error rates in the transmission of data across neural synapses. But I was remarkably productive all the same, first helping to put out yet another fire keeping our site down, then moving decisively to restructure the offending page so it wouldn't come anywhere near misbehaving in the future.
In the evening, our neighbor Lisa came by and made the friendly neighbourly suggestion that we watch a horror flick she'd rented called Strangeland. It starred Dee Snyder (formerly the front man for the mid-80s glam metal act Twisted Sister) as an evil kidnapping body modifying pervert. Perhaps to draw on the shock value of "the internet," our villain's "hunt for victims" took place in an especially clunky online chat room. It's awfully hard to make a chat room look cinematically exciting, and I wouldn't say this movie did any better than average. After luring his victims (white people of either gender) into his clutches and imprisoning them in his basement, our villain would sew their mouths shut and pierce them against their will, sometimes using elaborate baroque devices. Overall, the movie was little more than a bad low-budget take on Silence of the Lambs without any of the psychological drama or attempts at plot subtlety. The villain is caught, imprisoned, released, and continues on with his rampage without any interesting changes to either him or the people he affects. The ending was straightforward Hollywood horror genre cliché. Lisa had said she was going to have nightmares about this flick, but I confess I forgot about it the moment it was over. For Kim and me, I think, the chief shock value of the movie, the fact that people pierce themselves for pleasure and might in certain cases go weirdo and start piercing others as well, just wasn't shocking. Piercing, even obscure piercing, is old news to us. It contains no intrigue. In the 80s, Dee Snyder made lame, predictable music and thought he was pushing the envelope and now he's doing the same with film. End of story, except to say that occasionally it's good to write a review for a truly lame movie. But it's also to fair to point out that I did watch the whole thing without falling asleep, something I've done during both David Lynch and Woody Allen movies.
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