Drowning by Numbers
Seething Wells Halls of Residence, Kingston University, 2001.
“I bet,” Will said thoughtfully, “that I could set your smoke alarm off using a Jedi mind trick.”
“It’s two in the morning,” I countered. “And none of you are meant to be here…so it’s a good thing I don’t believe in Jedis.”
It had been surprisingly easy sneaking the band in really. My halls had a strict policy regarding guests – one at a time, for a maximum of two nights – but once you got past the security guards at the front gate of the complex, everyone just assumed you were meant to be there and left you to it. Will, Cunt Girl and Mike had rolled in at around midnight after playing a gig in central, and had filled my tiny flat with guitars, amps and, somehow, more trainers than they had feet.
Will waved his hand confidently under the smoke alarm. Sure enough, it went off.
“SEE?” He yelled. “I’M A JEDI!”
“NO YOU’RE NOT!” I shouted back. “YOU’RE JUST HOLDING A FUCKING CIGARETTE!”
I clamped my hands over my ears and tried desperately to think. We were all pretty drunk by this point, and everything seemed to be swaying in time with the wailing alarm.
“I HAVE TO GO TO THE ASSEMBLY POINT OUTSIDE,” I explained, gesticulating wildly. “HIDE!”
I grabbed my coat and ran out of the flat. I shouldn’t have hurried; the fire engines hadn’t even turned up yet, and everyone else was trickling out slowly, wrapped in duvets and dressing gowns and looking incredibly sorry for themselves.
There were, in total, 60 people that needed to be accounted for.
I was the only one fully dressed.
By the time the fire engines ground to a halt beside us, I think I was about 30 seconds away from being lynched.
“Right everyone,” one of our security guards called out. “You know the drill. The system says the alarm originated in N4E. Who’s in N4E?”
I raised my hand sheepishly.
“We have to search your flat before we can give the all-clear.”
I nodded, dumbstruck, and watched six firemen and two security guards head into the block.
Five minutes later the alarm died, and six firemen, two security guards and a very confused-looking Mike filed back out of the building.
The duvet and dressing gown zombies piled back inside. What I presumed was the head-fireman strode over to me, pulling Mike along by his elbow.
“This,” head-fireman said, “was under your bed. He seemed to be under the impression that if he couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see him.”
I searched Mike’s face, trying to gauge the situation. Where were Will and Cunt Girl? Had they jumped out of my bedroom window? I was only on the first floor, so it seemed plausible.
Head-fireman sighed. “Right, both of you come back inside.”
He nodded to one of his subordinates, and the two of them escorted Mike and I back to my room. They sat us down on my bed, and proceeded to give us an extensive lecture on fire safety, drinking, drugs and chip pans.
I just couldn’t work it out. Between the four of us – me, Mike, head-fireman and lackey-fireman – the room was uncomfortably full. I tried to look attentive, but kept stealing glances around the room. There were four pairs of men’s trainers strewn across the floor. I tried not to focus on them in case one of the uniforms followed my gaze. Where the fuck were the other two?
Finally, head-fireman rounded off his speech with a stern warning regarding what would happen if he ever had to talk to me again, and announced that they would let themselves out.
The door clicked shut behind them. I listened to their footsteps fade away down the corridor, and then breathed out for what felt like the first time in 20 minutes.
Then, Will and Cunt Girl fell out of the wardrobe.
“It was so hot in there,” Cunt Girl announced, “that we thought there was an actual fire.”
“So after they caught Mike,” Will chimed in, “I snuck out and saved the vodka, just in case. Told you I’m a Jedi.”
He handed me the very last of our Smirnoff. I gulped it back neat, and lit another cigarette.
Leaders of the fictional free world
A presidential picture round! Click on the link below to try your luck/knowledge/boredom:
Silver screen Santas
It’s Christmas! Sort of. Okay, not really, but people keep going on about the John Lewis advert so it must be happening some time before January.
To celebrate peak midget-employment season, here’s a quiz picture round I made a few months ago when I was bored and it was sunny. If you can name all 11 films you win a cookie*, so leave your answers in a comment or bug me on twitter.com/emxme if you’re feeling Santa-smart.
*Contains milk, wheat gluten and soya. May also be fictional.
Acción Mutante
IMDB score: 6.4
#wifebanter score: CAKEY
The debut feature from Álex de la Iglesia, who looks like a Spanish Kevin Smith and directs like the deranged bastard offspring of John Waters and Dino De Laurentiis. I’ve seen two of his films already; the blood and greasepaint-smeared Balada Triste de Trompeta (The Last Circus) and the comparatively sedate 800 Balas (800 Bullets), his homage to spaghetti Westerns and compulsive liars. Now that I’ve bought Acción Mutante I’m probably going to have to collect the whole set, because I’m a dick like that.
Acción Mutante is a charmingly cheap slice of sci-fi sleaze set in a dystopian beautocracy which rejects everyone from the hideously deformed to the just plain creepy-looking. The plot, what there is of it, follows the kidnapping of a rich heiress by the titular group of terrorists Mutant Action, who are probably the most inept criminals in the history of film-making. Essentially if you’re looking for in-depth characterisation, or perhaps a coherent narrative, then you should probably move along quietly. If you’re more into floating torsos, lip-stapling, Siamese twins and condiment-based torture, then put your feet up and stay a while.
Only figuratively of course, because if that’s really what you’re into then I’m not letting you in my house.
The Ghost
IMDB score: 6.3
#wifebanter score: SOGGY
This was one of Nic’s amazing Poundland finds. It comes up on Wiki under the rather lamentable title Dead Friend, presumably because whoever was in charge of Korean to English translation the day they were thinking up international titles hated their job. Anyway, it’s about an amnesiac student who’s trying to piece her past back together while being persecuted by a ghost who’s roughly 60% hair and 40% bath water.
I’m probably not selling it to you am I? It’s really quite good, in that semi-incomprehensible way that South Korean horror tends to be. Also, if like me you’re terrified of those nasty knots of hair that get pulled out of plug holes like drowned hamsters, it’s distinctly nightmare-inducing. Oh, and there’s a recurring water-vomiting theme, if that’s your sort of thing.
Defenestration
Someone had left an old TV in the corridor. I didn’t know who – it was that kind of house – and it had been sitting there, gathering dust, for a good few weeks. This was 2007 so it was one of those big cathode ray bastards, and you had to take a weird little half-step to the right to get past it on the way downstairs to the kitchen.
It was annoying the crap out of me, so I decided to throw it out of my window.
Back then, I shared a dilapidated Victorian terrace with three equally dilapidated guys. My room was on the second floor, and was relatively homely if you ignored the fact that I was too poor to afford a bed. Anyway, I lugged the offending TV set upstairs, trailing the plug along behind me, and set it down on one of my bookcases. My sash window looked out onto our postage-stamp of a back garden, which was ideal as I didn’t particularly want to maim a passing pedestrian with my rock’n’roll behaviour.
At this point, I reasoned that it was best to get on with it before someone stopped me. I wedged open the window – which like everything else in the house, and the tenants, didn’t work properly – and did my best to heft the TV out of it.
It wasn’t really a throw, to be honest. The damn thing was too heavy. No, if I’m being fair it was a half-throw, half-tip. Still, it made a beautiful sound, and threw up a heck of a cloud of dust.
I ran downstairs to survey my handiwork.
As I picked my way through the wreckage on the patio, feeling rather pleased with myself, I heard the window above me rumble open. It was my strange hermit-housemate, looking wild in an open dressing gown and bed hair.
It was four in the afternoon. Again, it was that kind of house.
“Hey!” he yelled. “I WANTED THAT!”
I squinted up at him, then looked back down at my feet. I kicked a bit of broken glass idly.
“It didn’t have a SCART socket.”
“Oh,” he said, instantly deflated. “Okay, as you were.”
Zombies: Wicked Little Things
IMDB score: 5.0
#wifebanter score: CUTESY
A low-rent 2006 horror which I bought because it has Hit Girl in it. Well, okay, that and the z-word. I’m a sucker for the z-word. In this instance we get zombie ghost miner children, because of some evil landowner or something. I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention to that bit. So, dead minor miners, and a pre-purple wig Chloë Grace Moretz playing a character so saccharine that half the time she seems to be disgusted with her own lines.
Zombies does absolutely everything by the hick-horror book. Creepy cabins. Animal mutilation. Loco locals. Tearaway teens getting hacked to death by hungry, pick-axe wielding Victorian children….
Okay, so it gets a few points for originality there. Plus, the zombie ghost children are really quite endearing. They spend most of the film ambling around harmlessly, looking delightfully Dickensian and photogenic. I ended up rooting for them, hoping they’d put poor Miss Moretz out of her misery.
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