Dirty Vikings

I watch a lot of crap. Figuratively.

But I enjoy bad movies, good movies, independent movies, foreign movies, extremely low-budget movies...well, just about any kind of movie. It's an obsession. I know that. I'm not a real big TV junkie so when nothing interesting is on any of the channels, I will put a movie on. And the available streaming of Netflix is like crack to a, um, crack addict.

So every once in a while I am gonna come across something unexpected. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I ran into the "sometimes bad" variety over this past weekend. It's a little film called Severed Ways that I didn't quite make it all the way through for reasons I will go into in a little bit. But it's about two Norse men who were stranded in North America during one of the Vikings excursions west of Greenland around AD 1007.  It was an odd film.  American, for what I can tell even though the men spoke in Old Norse.  Each chapter was punctuated by a brief bit of some black metal music by bands like Dimmu Borgir and Burzum (a pretty disturbing story with that band, by the way). The camera-work was shaky and the pacing was extremely slow.

But it wasn't the pacing, the camera work or the black metal that made me turn this one off.  It was something else entirely.

I remember the only time I saw Caligula some time back.  Slyde and I had gone to over to a friend's house who had just purchased the film on laser disc back when laser disc was the way to go when watching films. And the three of us were totally unprepared for some of the extra hard-core sex scenes that Bob Guccione added to the original film.  Like the brief scene showing one dude giving another dude oral pleasure, if ya know what I mean.  I had somehow managed to make it 30 years without seeing one dude give another dude a blowjob, but there it was.  I'm not a prude, by any means, but there are some things that I would just rather not see.  This is one of them.

Then there was the episode of Oz that showed Christopher Meloni's character peeing in a bucket while in solitary.  Now Meloni was never an actor who was afraid of showing off his hog on camera, but he took it to another level in this episode.  I remember Slyde calling me the next day as we marveled at his "acting ability".  I mean there was no way that was CGI.  He was really peeing in the bucket.  Lee Strasburg can't teach anyone better than that.  Peeing on command on camera.  But this is another one of those things that I really could have done without seeing.

And Severed Ways took it to a whole new level.

About a half-hour into the film, one of the Vikings took a shit in the woods. He took his pants down or his tunic up, whatever, he squatted down and he took a shit.  And then the camera panned down to show a close-up of the actual dirty deed.  Even the cleanup phase afterward with some leaves.

I couldn't get to the remote control quick enough to turn that shit off.  No pun intended.  I was done with this version of 2 Vikings 1 Cup, if you know what I mean.  And I think you do.  I just don't have the stomach for that kind of thing.  The ultimate "I really didn't need to see that" moment, if you ask me.

So, apparently I watch a lot of crap.  Literally.

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. Does a Viking shit in the woods?  Apparently he does.