So I wrote a whole bunch of words and then when I went back to say some more words all my words were gone because WordPress, despite having “word” in the name, forgot about all my words and gave me a page full of NO WORDS so then I languished about for several weeks, lacking the strength to continue after having written quite possibly the BEST BLOG POST EVER TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN and then having lost it to the fickle nets of the inter (presumably because The Man doesn’t want THE TRUTH TO GET OUT).
So for your pre-New Years/mid-Kwanzaa enjoyment, here is my review of ANTIVIRAL. Antiviral is a dystopian sci-fi horror film by the Lesser Cronenberg, son of Greater Cronenberg, but fear not, Rick and Morty fans, it still manages to Cronenberg it up. Our story is set in the near future, where, instead of collecting celebrity toenails and used tissues on ebay, fandom has advanced to the point that you can purchase the exact strain of virus that your favorite celebrity most recently suffered. Imagine all the Hip Young Teens injecting themselves with Bieber Fever instead of having to make up a pretend fever to explain why they enjoy the music of someone who is not only insufferable, but also Canadian. Think of all the nerds who would flock to the pharmacy for the chance to guzzle George R.R. Martin’s tit sweat in the hopes of catching his….diabetes or something. Maybe whatever flu it is that keeps him from writing faster. (I don’t know what he does all day – I assume it’s eating jelly donuts and dreaming of blood sacrifice.)
Our protagonist, Syd (the future is spelled with lots of ‘y’s), steals celebrity diseases, breaks the fancy patent science that renders them useless after one infection, and infects himself with them in order to later remove the disease from himself and sell it on the black market, which you may recognise as being 1. a bad idea, and 2. A Bad Idea. After stealing the disease of a particularly popular actress, the actress is reported dead from her illness and Syd is finding it difficult to science his way out of this one. After much failed sciencestry, Syd is a sweaty, gross, Cronenbergy mess when he is collected by some sort of celebrity body guard mafia and OTHER BAD THINGS HAPPEN.
This is where I both get confused and don’t want to spoiler you, so I shall leave it at that. But this film is actually kind of interesting. Apart from just being an interesting take on our increasingly obsessive celebrity culture (there is a company in the movie which reproduces celebrity muscle cells and sells clumps of them as meat – GET OUT YOUR BIEBER CLEAVER, WE’RE MAKING BIEBERONI!!! :D) (goddamn, this post IS as good as that other one), but it also has that great slow, austere, and depressing atmosphere that I love from my dystopian futures. It’s somewhat slow and quiet compared to a lot of horror films, and it is heavily sci-fi, but it still leaves you with that yummy somewhat disturbed feeling that a good horror gives you. Also Cronenbergs.
I declare it to be…….FOUR HORRORS.
Also I promise to get into more letters in 2016. WE CAN MAKE IT TO B. #yeswecan #feeltheb
Horror in order 