I just started watching this thing called Spides. In a nutshell the set-up is that there is a new club drug with the stunningly original name of bliss, which seems to be causing people a lot more than a heavy comedown. People who take it tend to go missing, and then turn up again, but with the slight problem that often their family insists that, despite looking the same, it's not really their son or daughter who has come back. So, thus far it feels like a bit of a mash up of Blue Sunshine and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, two good films that I'm happy to see given a re-rub and transplanted to Berlin club culture.
I assume it's a German production, given that, as well as being set in Berlin the actors speak (in English) with German accents. And as I'm mentioning the actors, I do need to talk about the actual acting which really is quite, er... extraordinary.
These days we're used to seeing professional level, naturalistic - if uninspired - acting in even the crappiest soaps or the most worthless US nonsense (you know, things such as Grey's Anatomy* that you might happen to catch a few seconds of while surfing through the channels to see if there is anything on worth watching, and which cause you to instantly flick over as fast as your fingers can hit the button when you reaslise what it is - or even what kind of thing it is) and, as a result, it's truly quite shocking when you see something where the acting can't even dream about approaching that level. At first I wondered if it was some kind of experiment - like Herzog's Heart of Glass where the actors were famously hypnotized so that they stumbled through the film like wooden zombies to whom the idea of acting was an alien concept or, I dunno, Svankmayer's Alice with its bizarrely toneless narrator - but I think that here the reason just boils down to the fact that much of the cast ARE wooden zombies who don't know how to act and who would fail an audition for a primary school nativity play. Admittedly they are wrestling with an, at times, laughable script. which could make fools of anyone.
Hmmm... I'm not really selling this am I? Well, the jury is still out at the moment. I like the set-up, I can get past the acting most of the time - although every now and then a line kinda jerks me out of the action and I feel myself wanting to say something like "Why don't you try imagine how you would feel if you were in that situation and then try and project that emotion from how you speak and move?" but i guess it's too late to save these guys now and it would take someone with considerably more skill and patience than me to give it a go. Um, anyway, yeah the beginning is good, there is a girl who has woken up from a bliss-induced coma and totally lost her memory but who is clearly caught up in this web of sinister mad scientists and creepy policemen and so on. Just all those kind of sci-fi standards with some drug paranoia and stuff, but I suppose it feels like these things are such standards in a way that no-one bothers to make them any more and that's a shame, and now they have bothered to make one and it's instantly enjoyable and that explains why these ideas are so standard - they're just really good. And also I think there is gonna be some kind of giant spiders or something involved later which should be a laugh.
*I mention Gray's Anatomy cos there is one channel here that seems to have it on all the fucking time. And I - like anyone in their right mind I assume - just instantly turn it over, to me when I see it it just feels like a kind of dead channel, I never think anything like "oh maybe I should give this a go some time" cos my brain doesn't process it like that, it doesn't see as a viable television programme, more just this kind of weird block that they sometimes put on a channnel for a few hours to put it out of action for a bit, I guess like in the old days when channels used to shut down for the night and just leave that screensaver type thing which had a pupper drawing on a blackboard or something (except that that option had more in the way of a plot and, in fact I read about some people who were fascinated by those things and collected all the variants or something... but now my digression is digressing, I apologise). Although one time it occured to me that all people probably turn it over as I do and that no-one had ever watched it and maybe it was the greatest programme ever and that I (and maybe everyone else) was missing out on it cos of prejudice. So I did go and ask loads of people if they had ever seen a whole episode, and eventually I found someone who had story about being at his parent's house one time and he was sick in bed and effectively trapped there and they didn't have many channels, so basically he had to watch it and he said it was even worse than he had thought it would be. So I'm glad to have had that cleared up anyway.