| The problem with making a dark and disturbing version of Alice in Wonderland is
that it's pretty dark and disturbing to begin with, which gives it little training wheels
that help cultural firebrands ride it into geniusdom once every eighteen months or
so. Masterminding a trippy reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll is like making a
version of Crazy Traxi, only crazy! At this point, about the
edgiest thing you could do with Alice in Wonderland is
try to make it a little less fucking insane. |
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This edgy 1932 Wizard of Oz board game was just a bloody dog's head in a
box, which was legal at the time.
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For those of you still stuck on Alice's creepy
atmosphere, I decided that I would recreate its spirit of petulant rebellion right here in
this review. For free.
My first thought was that I'd really stick it to the Christian Savior.
It's an edgy concept, because it might upset old people like your grandparents and
Harrison Ford and, as far as I knew, it hadn't been done before. I decided I'd find
a picture of Jesus Christ, have Chet kick me in the nuts, then piss blood all over
it. But while I was looking for a suitable portrait, I stumbled across this
disturbing image some Internet crackpot made of Jesus nailed to a cross!
I was like "Ho-lee Mother of Fucker, somebody beat me to it."
Granted, that didn't stop American McGee, but I really wanted to cook up a spicy,
but also eerie and creepy, edgy meatball for this review. Anyway, here's what I
eventually came up with:
If you're feeling comforted, but also anxious and disturbed, then welcome
to Erik's Hallmark Sympathy Card™, the most harrowing expression of sympathy the
world has ever known! Chet took one look at it and was like, "whoa, we're not
in Kansas anymore!" Then he thought for a second and said "This isn't your
Daddy's sympathy card anymore!" Then he was like "You go girl!"
Then he was out of stuff to say.
How did I achieve this effect? It was simple. And brilliant
and sick and twisted.
I started with already-edgy raw materials. In this case, a
sympathy card, which implies that there's probably a human corpse around somewhere.
I turned the gamma way down to make the card appear därkyr, then
spelled darker the way a Swedish black metal band might just before they burned up a
church.
I pricked my index finger, and used it to transform the card's
tranquil stream into a boiling sea of blood by rubbing my fingertip across it. You
don't want to forget this step. Make sure you splash blood all over everything.
Chet wiped a booger on the white space at the lower left end of the
card. I can't tell you why we did this, or why it's so effective. Chalk it up
to artistic intuition.
Finally, I tilted the card at a funny angle. Not funny ha ha, but funny
insane!
| The plot of the card is that we can't possibly know why things happen the
way they do but that we should remember how much others care but also that the river runs
red with blood! Honest to God, that's about eight more words of plot than Alice has. I
really hope Miramax president Harvey Weinstein is reading this, because I have a lot of
ideas for making it into a motion picture. Series. It's a chilling
reinterpretation of condolence in which people seeking sympathy and other people seeking
to express sympathy find only terror! And some sympathy, so that
girls will like it too. |
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Shemp Howard was the American McGee of the Three Stooges. Here he is
in "Ghost Crazy" his eerie reinterpretation of "Abbott and Costello Meet
The Ghosts". Perhaps the most insane part of the project is that he replaced
the other two stooges with Max 'Slapsie Maxie' Rosenbloom (pictured). Note skull.
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