p e n g u i n d e v i l

So yes, a month and a half of nothing. I know that my readership (by which I mean Myself) finds that very obnoxious. Well, today is the lucky day. I watched two movies tonight and it’s the weekend, so I’ll splurge!

First off was a movie that I’ve been wanting to see for a while and was recently surprised to find available to stream on Netflix: Until the Light Takes Us. I didn’t really know much about it, except for that I thought it was a low-budget doc about the early days of Norwegian Black Metal and, well, that’s just what it is! As someone who is a fan of the Lords of Chaos book, this film was certainly the best document that I’ve seen on those “church burning and death”-filled early days of NBM. The movie is basically just interviews, the majority of which are with Fenriz, though a good deal of Varg is in it too. There is also some lame and weird stuff with Bard. Plus Frost, Hellhammer and those Immortal guys all have some stuff to say.

Frost does some black-metally corpse-painted performance art crap in Italy that was really embarrassing but even worse, while I know that corpse paint out-of-context does seem somewhat silly, I would rather see Abbath and Demonaz in their corpse-paint work-look than see their sunglasses and leather coat wearing, slick-backed hair euro-trash selves (what I like to think of as “the Ulver effect”), which is what we get here. Fenriz of course, looked his cool trve-metal self the whole time.

I’ve always kind of liked Fenriz and it was entertaining to watch his sort of rambling reminiscences and complaints about what happened with Black Metal, it becoming a product and all. Varg (still in prison when this was filmed) comes across as coherent and intent on explaining everything, but he also comes across as an arrogant sociopath. So, while it was worth it to hear his step by step description of his murder of Euronymous, it also makes you doubt his “self-defense” defense.

Most annoyingly is Bard though. I don’t know much about Bard, being primarily familiar with him from reading Lords of Chaos, but here he is presented in shadow with his voice disguised… Maybe he is a mob informer or something… I don’t know, but I couldn’t help but think it was a bit silly, i mean, what? Is Varg going to come calling with his pocket knife again?

Before that though, I watched X-Files: Fight the Future. Over the last 2-3 months I’ve watched the first 5 seasons of X-Files and this movie, coming out after the conclusion of the 5th Season is, in my mind, where the show should have stopped. In case you don’t know, in the 5th season of the show, exactly what the big conspiracy is all about comes to light and we learn a bunch about how it works, then the X-files are shut down. Fight the Future starts out with them being reassigned and working on a domestic terrorism bomb threat. But of course, something is discovered in the aftermath of the bombing that points to a government cover up and off we go! Well, everything about the conspiracy is really brought to light and explained in this one, and even though the ending is set up to lead to a continuance, I really thought that they could easily have just ended the series nicely with this movie.