Good Writing Gets Me Off

Or the Snowpocalypse or whatever you want to call it.   Being from Michigan, the foot-plus of snowfall in Philadelphia this weekend really didn’t even make me blink.  Though out here, inches induce mass panic, so “serious” snowfall is kind of impressive for a change.  If it’s going to be cold, there might as well be snow.  Still, I thought I had left major snowfall behind me when I left Michigan.  Seems I just got off easy the previous four winters.  On the upside, having bought a condo instead of a house means no shoveling for me.  I so don’t missing digging out my mother’s driveway with foot-plus snow fall and ice chunks from the city plows.  My back is grateful.

So while the other citizens of my fair city were busy shoveling and/or freaking out, what did I do with my time?  Well, I had intended to do my taxes this weekend, or see if I could do them with the whole condo purchasing fun of the past year.  I didn’t.  The stack of 1099s and other assorted tax docs for loans, my W2, etc., just made me go “meh” and do anything but.  Managed to clean my floors and do some laundry, so I wasn’t completely unproductive.  The rest of my weekend was spent faffing about on the internet and watching really bad disaster movies.  Basic spoilers, so avoid if you care, but I highly doubt you’ll be wanting to watch any of these.

Movie one was Virus from 1980, with actual recognizable stars like Robert Vaughn, Olivia Hussey, and Edward James Olmos.  There were a couple other notables that I always know by face but not by name.  The premise was hardly unique with the government manufactured supervirus that wipes out everyone on the planet.  Although, unlike say The Stand, the only survivors are the lucky few with natural resistance, but a lucky submarine crew and a group of international scientists down in Antarctica.  So the execution was something different, that counts for something.  And the psycho military dude who set the automatic nuke system into action did have a payoff of sorts.  It’s hardly a movie I’d watch again, but wasn’t an utter waste of time.

Of course, women get predictably shafted in the post-apocalyptic world.  The station has more than eight hundred men and…just eight women.  Which means, you guessed it, women are the new rare, valuable resource.  Women must “suppress” their natural instincts and the men reign in their primal urges, so that the propagation of the species happens with the greatest genetic diversity.  Yup, a system of appointments of various men with the few women is set up.  I can see the “logic” in the arrangement, but Jesus.  But what really pissed me off is that the whole conversation came about after one of the women came before the “government”, supported by the other women, after having been raped and beaten.  And essentially it all boils down to, “Sucks to be you, honey, but that does raise an interesting point.  We need to start making babies.”  Personally, I would have either grabbed the nearest gun or went for a nice icy swim or quite possible bundled up, grabbed some food, and took my chances on my own.  The human race is on its last legs, I’m going to enjoy what’s left to me, not fight a losing battle.  But I’m just selfish like that.

The next movie I watched was Deadly Harvest from the late ‘70s, and the only notable face was Kim Cattral.  Essentially, the climate has gone wonky and disrupted the food production enough that the human race is on the brink of starvation.  The farmers are down to their bare stores and can’t really grow more, and the city folk are in more dire straits as their rations have been cut off.  So the city folk raid the countryside and the farms for the food.  People die in the crossfire.  Blah blah blah.  And not once did anyone consider cannibalism.  Very disappointing.

I watched The Last Winter on Netflix Instant Watch, much more recent (2007) and more suspense with strains of disaster.  Ron Perlman was the growly head of an oil company in the Arctic Reserve who basically spent most of the movie having a pissing contest with the environmentalist.  Partly over a girl, partly just because.  And then really bad shit starts to happen with temperatures rising and people going crazy.  All but the girl wind up dead, but her chances don’t look so hot as nature is fighting back with mad weather and driving other people crazy outside the Arctic.

This I followed with The Chaos Experiment from 2009, starring Val Kilmer, Armand Assante, Eric Roberts, Patrick Muldoon, and assorted nameless others.  Val is a rather batshit ex-professor who had some theories about the end of the world in 2012 and global warming.  To prove his theory of how people are going to lose it, he locks six people in a steam room and lets heat and psychology work their wicked ways, with a bit of help.  Or he might just be making it up.  But if it did happen, it’s happening now or it happened months ago. And Armand the cop has to figure it all out.  I’ll certainly never listen to Bolero the same way again.  It wasn’t a horrible premise, entirely, and there were some okay moments, but the end just sort of fell apart.  There’s sort of an answer as to whether or not it did happen, but not when or who all was involved.

Lastly, I dug out one of my favorites, Ravenous with Guy Pearce, Robert Carlysle, Jeffery Jones, and David Arquette.  Cannibalism at an 1840s military outpost in California.  I’d classify it as a dark comedy with fair writing and decent execution.  I have far worse guilty pleasure movies, that’s for sure.

And I did tag a bit with Grey, so there was some writing this weekend, not just a bunch of bad movie watching.  Really.