Wednesday, June 4, 2008

My Dark Place Is Protected By A Steel Chastity Belt

Remember the 80’s and early 90’s? All those hours spent reading Goosebumps and watching the festering corpses of horror and science fiction clubbed like seals by junior college “English majors” wielding bats of clichés on the SciFi channel (or any other network with self esteem so low it could only have been brought on by years of ostracism and rejection by more popular, hotter networks that dated the Lifetime channel) while the rest of the kids were going to “dances” and “socializing” and “making friends” will finally be put to good use. And FUCK YOU Mr. Donnehough, if you had graded my Steven King book reports appropriately [Grade: F. Stas, if you keep on reading these Steven King novels, I’m going to insist on putting you in the special class because anyone who can be entertained by 300+ pages of cut and paste plot structure over and over again either has Alzheimer’s or is a goldfish. – Donnehough P.S. You are stupid.] I would’ve spent the summer lassoing a girlfriend instead of writing a scifi version of The Lottery.

Bitter memories aside, do I have a show for you. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is a spoof of the type of television shows I mentioned above, complete with wooden acting, ridiculous plot premises, 80s hair, rockin’ synth music, and even “behind the scenes” interviews with the cast. This show is as funny as the Gulag Archipelago is long (Soviet dissident literature reference, booyah!). However, no one can introduce Darkplace better than Garth Marenghi himself, so here is an excerpt from the opening credits.

“I’m Garth Marenghi. Author. Dream Weaver. Visionary. Class actor. You are about to enter the world of my imagination. You are entering my dark place.”

For your enjoyment, the following is an outline of the third episode:
Dr. Rick Dagless rescues a patient who’s in the process of having his “dark place” violated by a giant walking eye with an equally enormous penis by shooting the eye monster with a magnum he happens to be carrying in his lab coat. The patient then gives birth to an eye-monster baby (eye-monsters have very short gestation periods). Dr. Rick Dagless abducts the eyechild to raise as his own because it reminds him of his dead, green-ant-alien looking son (stick with me). Hilarity ensues as Dagless attempts to hide the eyechild until the staff finds him and the eyechild on the roof. Cue fight and chase sequence. Dagless is finally subdued inside the hospital and brought to his senses. As Dagless goes to caress the eyechild for a final time, it bites him. Shouting in pain, Dagless smashes the eyechild against every wall and table in sight while it is attached to the tip of his finger, then shouts in horror when he sees what he has done. Flashbacks and ridiculous dialogue. The End.

Don't believe me? Behold the mighty YouTube (do not miss the eye-on-man sex starting at 3:50).

- Stas

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