Teen Vamp Review

Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 Review

Taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

The blood, the guts… The eyebrows.

Episode 1 of No Soap Radio Polka, in which Jack reviews one of his all-time favourite films, Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2, starring over-flexed uber stud Ricky Caldwell.

Blip.tv: http://nosoapradiopolka.blip.tv/file/3869568/
YouTube: Coming Soon
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093974/

Bingo!
The blood, the guts… The eyebrows.
Episode 1 of No Soap Radio Polka, in which Jack reviews one of his all-time favourite films, Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2, starring over-flexed uber stud Ricky Caldwell.
Blip.tv: http://nosoapradiopolka.blip.tv/file/3869568/
YouTube: Coming Soon
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093974/

Bingo!

N-Dubz

Taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

Despite producing songs which are less enjoyable than a brain haemorrhage, N-Dubz have fastly become one of the country’s most popular pop groups. They even have their own book, N-Dubz – Against All Odds: From Street Life to Chart Life, assuming there are any semi-literate N-Dubz fans out there.

I didn’t realise that the situation in the country was so grave. It seems that rather than funding a mission to propel these people into the sun, people are apparently spending their well earned assets on purchasing their music instead. The people of this country are a glutton for punishment.

I’m not quite sure I understand their mass appeal. I can only assume it’s because an embarrassingly large percentage of stupid Brits have mistaken their outdated chav loutishness for rebelliousness, when in fact Dappy and his crew are about as bad as Duplo.

Dappy looks like the terrifying love child of John Waters and Billy Banks and seems to have learnt all he knows about rap music from watching extensive repeats of The Fresh Prince of Bell-Air.

After stumbling across the book, imagine my horror when I found out that the hell doesn’t end there. Yes, they even have their own TV show, Being N-Dubz, in which The Dubz parade across the globe inflicting their obnoxiousness on other countries and generally acting like the worst people on the planet.

The programmes producers must have worked hard to cram so much bad into such a short space of time. In fact, that’s bullshit. They no doubt had hours of footage of these terrible people acting like complete morons, which becomes obvious as the show progresses. Sitting through the opening of this show is like piercing your own eyeball. It’s a montage of idiocy, in which Dappy and the two other Duz prance around being unbearable.

“We’re too fucking cool, man,” says Dappy, whilst resembling an aborted Diddy Kong foetus.  He goes on to say, ”I’m Dappy! I was committing crime whilst you was in your nappy!” at which point I give up on life.

I hate you, England. What happened to you? You used to be cool – for a short period of time in the ’60s and then for an even shorter period of time in the late ’70s.

The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy

Taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

As a child, I never doubted the quality of video games. If a particularly difficult video game had lousy controls, incomprehensible dialogue or glitchy graphics, I’d automatically assume that I just had to step up my game. To my 6 year-old self, bad game design was simply part of the challenge. It was only during the Playstation era that I started to think that perhaps some of these games weren’t actually that great and that perhaps a lot of them were just rushed, glitch-riddled cash-ins.

I found The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy particularly irritating as a child and within minutes of playing today, it’s still got the ability to make me want to stick my irate, sweaty hand into the NES game tray and electrocute myself into blissful unconsciousness. But unlike a large number of irritating video games from my childhood, this instalment of the Dizzy franchise isn’t actually a bad game. It’s mind numbingly tedious and annoying, but I still genuinely believe that it’s simply because I’m not very good at it.

By the time you’ve made sufficient progress, collected most of the stars and solved the majority of the puzzles, you’ve probably already wasted a sufficient portion of your day and life. As a child, I wasted many a Saturday attempting to complete this game before I had to inevitably turn the NES off or pause it indefinitely until I have the skill and determination to complete it someday in the future. Perhaps when I had the knowledge and wisdom to complete it.

The box claims that Dizzy “Will entertain you for a long time,” which despite from sounding like a depressingly underwhelming claim, is true. The game is undoubtedly entertaining. But eventually, hours of hard work and puzzle solving starts to seem futile. The previously entertaining mini-games start to feel like obstacles preventing you from getting anything out of the game whatsoever, and finally, you get so frustrated you actually want Dizzy to die; you don’t even want yourself to win.

Dizzy looking creepy as hell.

Nevertheless, for the couple of hours of fun alone, it’s still one of the better egg-based games on the NES. In fact, I guess you could call The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy the Citizen Kane of the egg genre. This is a game that changed the way people think about eggs in video games and eggs in general.

The game features our protagonist (and egg), Dizzy, on his quest to save his girlfriend, Daisy (also an egg), from the evil wizard Zaks. I’m not exactly sure what Zaks’ beef with Dizzy is and why he’s chosen to kidnap an egg, but he has, so bear with me. He’s also put a spell on the people (I mean eggs) of Dizzy’s village, which I should probably point out, is suspended in the trees, for reasons beyond the realms of basic comprehension.

Dizzy walking around his preposterously tall treehouse home.

Using You spend much of the game jumping around Dizzy’s village and helping his unbelievably stupid friends, who in turn give you items to help you get to Zaks’ ridiculous, and frankly pretty tacky, cloud castle. Yes, Zaks isn’t just a weird sexual deviant with a fetish for promiscuously dressed eggs; he also lives in a cloud castle: the campest of all castles.

The mini-games are probably my favourite element of the game. I particularly like the mine cart mini-game, in which the player has to travel through a car in a mine cart while avoiding obstacles. There’s also a cool little mini-game where Dizzy is stranded at the bottom of the sea and has to stand on rising bubbles, which pop after just a few seconds, to reach the surface before his air runs out.

Yes, apparently there are two types of egg in the Dizzy dimension: egg people and actual eggs. How terrifying.

The music is another of the games highlights, although it’s difficult to describe why. The music has a bizarre hypnotic quality that sounds strangely inspired by early ’90s acid house and techno, combining piercing synth lines and pulsating, rhythmically driven bass lines. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic here, but I’d go as far as saying that Dizzy is solely responsibly for shaping and defining modern electronica.

Unfortunately, I’ve never come close to completing this game. Even today, I’m still far too inadequate to complete all the puzzles, collect all the stars and make it to Zaks’ daffy cloud castle. Once, after hours upon hours of game play, I did make it to a castle, albeit not cloud, where I had to shoot small gremlin-type creatures with a cross bow, but I actually have no idea if I was close to completing the game or not. Probably not, given my long and farcical history with this game.

Nevertheless, played in short 1 to 2 hour sittings, Dizzy is a very entertaining game. Obviously, due to the many puzzles and mini-games, the longevity is enormous and I respect anyone who’s completed it with the respect only my six year-old self had for Zack Morris. I just advise anyone playing today to use a memory card to spare themselves some of the deep psychological pain I experienced and continue to experience.

The World Cup

Taken from http://nosoaradiopolka.co.uk:

So I awoke this morning to the sound of Wavin’ Flag – the “Celebration Mix” to be precise. If you’re unfamiliar with Wavin’ Flag, it’s a mind-numbingly horrendous collection of obnoxious noises falsely marketed as a song. Despite sounding like a euphemism for revealing ones privates, Wavin’ Flag is inexplicably popular with the masses, reaching the top ten in 6 countries and officially chosen as Coca-Cola’s promotional anthem for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It’s also the official anthem of  inebriated England fans across the country.

But let’s not forget all the other excellent England World Cup Songs this year, most of which seem to feature slightly overweight middle-age men wearing tight fitting England strips and strumming away on an old guitar they’ve probably had since the eighties, which is generally only reserved for particularly bad dinner parties and family events.

I wish I were joking, but it’s true. This is, unfortunately, the age of DIY music, where even a tone deaf bloated oaf can produce a top 30 single in their bedroom. Gone are the days when people like Eurovision hopeful Daz Sampson (widely regarded as the musical equivalent of Ted Budy) had to actually spend money on being awful. Now even Fabio (seen below), who apparently actually exists, can record himself singing like a diseased sea otter and compensate for his lack of singing ability by heavy-handedly glossing his recordings with insane amounts of auto-tune. Oddly, Fabio even uses auto-tune when he’s rapping, which if you ask me, seems like a terrible waste of bad technology.

So I guess it’s begun. I haven’t really been out for the past 3 days or so, but I’ve noticed the signs that a major sporting event is taking place. It’s difficult not to notice the empty streets and occasional drunk person staggering around outside my house. I’m not exaggerating. There’s been a fully blown drunk opera taking place outside my house for most of the day. Perhaps living practically next door to an off-licence doesn’t help, but people have been stood outside shouting and threatening each since roughly 12 o’clock. Only within the last couple of hours has the gallon of Lambrini they’ve been swigging kicked in and sedated them into submission, just before they started “Wavin’ Flag”.

Rather than watching the football this summer, I’ve chosen to spend my time religiously following professional football player and philosopher Cristiano Ronaldo’s highly informative Twitter page. Ronaldo dishes out regular bite-sized musings like, “I think Portugal is doing well. It’s true that we play a very tough group stage but this helps us to improve even more,” which I actually find quite inspiring.

Apologies for writing another post about football, but football and horrifically bad films have been the only two things I’ve had to think about this past week, so it was either this or a revised review of a review I’ve already written for Shark Attack 3. Although, admittedly, Shark Attack 3 looks like 8½ after listening to Wavin’ Flag.

Britain’s Got Talent… Apparently

Taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

I’ve had a really busy week writing reviews for bad films, but despite being locked away from the general public, I’ve still somehow managed to be subjected to Britain’s Got Talent.

It’s upsetting that a whole generation of people are growing up completely oblivious to how awful Piers Morgan is, who I physically can’t watch without wanting to punish myself for doing so. I’m not sure if it’s his smug face, his Billy Bear ham complexion or the fact that he genuinely seems to not be ashamed by his own existence, but he’s the worst.

Why are so many people happy to wilfully waste their weekends watching a gaudy talent contest that, if it weren’t for the fact that without it they wouldn’t be able to partake in their work’s hourly Britain’s Got Talent discussion, probably wouldn’t watch? Long question, I know. Sorry. But seriously, why are people tuning into this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqwx2U8uu9g

What is that? If you saw that in the street, you’d cross the road. It’s like something from an old, dated, embarrassing even at the time, episode of Byker Grove.

The show wouldn’t be quite so awful if it weren’t for the horrendous editing, which seems to be designed to limit the viewer’s independent thought to a bare minimum and break things down into short, simple instructions: applaud, laugh, cry and pick nose.

It’s insane. If five years ago, you said to someone, “In the future the most popular TV show in the country will be a tacky talent show that’s judged by Piers Morgan, Simon Cowell and Amanda Holden,” they’d think you were crazy. Why is this now apparently acceptable?

Football

Post taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

I have a very dark history when it comes to football. I can still hear the strained wail of bloated dads with delusions of grandeur telling a bunch of seven year-olds to kick a ball to their completely unspectacular and equally delusional son.

I probably sound a bit bitter, but I’m over it. By the time I was in my teens, I’d put the horror of playing football behind me and moved onto more rewarding sports. Masturbation mostly. Well, exclusively.

Still, I do occasionally wish I was still a football fan. It would make conversing with fellow males mildly less awkward. Without the necessary football knowledge, male conversations are a lot like trying to construct sentences without vowels and full stops. In times of crisis, I’ve come up with one sentence that I believe makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about: “Yeah, you see, [Insert Player's Name] might not be the most skillful player on the pitch, but hard work, determination and stamina make him a real winner.”

I can’t say it’s tried and tested, but I think it sounds good. Not that you’ll find much conversation during the world cup, when it’s temporarily replaced in pubs across the country by terrifying screams and roars. Nevertheless, I actually quite enjoy the world cup, perhaps because every football fan in the country unanimously supports Eng-er-land. There’s no risk of being ridiculed for supporting one of the popular teams like Manchester United, which in the world of footie, is the equivalent of admitting you own and enjoy Phil Collins’ …But Seriously.

As the world cup approaches, football adverts start appearing for products that have nothing to do with football and TV channels start depicting football as “the beautiful game”, with slow motion footage of football set to classical music, or if it’s ITV, U2′s Beautiful Day. ITV generally broadcast the best football coverage, not because it’s good, but because their commentators come out with the crappiest and most irrelevant analogies. Analogies like, “Zidane – the magician, mixing his magic once again here.” Or, minus the bullshit: Zidane – the football player, adequately playing football once again here.

ITV also have a secret weapon: Uri Geller, who regularly appears on GMTV, encouraging morons to start rubbing an orange dot on their TV screens and chanting, “England win! England win!” I don’t want to sound skeptical, but it hasn’t worked before, so if Geller makes the round this year, I’d probably give it a miss. Or rub harder perhaps.

Say what you will about the people of this country, but you have to admit that we love this place and everything it stands for. Well, the football team, at least – until we inevitably lose that is, then it’s time to quietly pack up the flags you gaffer taped to your house, wipe the white and red paint of our torsos and pretend football doesn’t exist for a couple of months.

Site Update at nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

Taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

I’ve been having terrible trouble with the site timing out and displaying a CGI Error message. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it seems to be getting worse and worse. Hopefully the situation will be resolved shortly.

Partially due to not being able to access the site and also lack of time, I haven’t been able to spend much time writing new posts, but I’m currently working on two new posts, which should be up before the end of the week.

Within the next 2-3 months, I’m compiling some of my articles and write some new ones for a zine that’ll feature illustrations from Fiona. The zine wil be distributed locally, but I’ll upload and new material and illustrations here for all to see.

I’ve also started writing scripts for a series of riff and review videos for some of the bad films I have lying around my house like, Magic Kidz, Driller Killer, Good Guys Wear Black, Dark Heritage, Invisible Mom 1 & 2; and Silent Night, Deadly Night 2.

It’s something I’ve been intending to do for a long time now. Unfortunately my current living arrangement isn’t ideal for filming, but hopefully after I move I’ll finally have enough space to start filming.

Finally, I watched this yesterday: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1498870/ and I was blown away by how awful it is. It’s also a complete rip-off of my own creation, Boner!

http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk/index.php/2010/01/25/guide-to-writing-a-teen-sex-comedy/

Guide to being a Student: Part 2 – Takeaways

Taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

Students are like a goldmine to takeaway owners. A moronic cash-spewing goldmine fuelled by brightly coloured menus advertising foul dishes with names like “Meat Feast” and “The Big Dripper”. Menus appear so regularly through students letter boxes, they’re pretty much newsletters. Nasty, badly designed newsletters that rarely ever change.

In my local area, one of the most frequently posted newsletters, has a stretched and pixelated image of The Simpsons on it. Bart and Lisa apparently love their pizzas! If you haven’t guessed, that appeals to students, although I think The Simpsons is far too good to be used to appeal to that demographic. They should have gone with a spliff or some tits. How’s that, Spliff & Tits Pizza?

Student Pizza really know how to appeal to students by actually calling themselves Student Pizza. This targets that important and wide demographic of people who think, “Student Pizza, eh? Hey, I am a student and I like pizza. Sure, why not?” whenever they see a Student Pizza menu.

You might occasionally find that a takeaway might have a 2, a 3 or even a 4 after its name. These are definitely the kind of places you should be eating. Like my personal favourite, Kabab-U-Like II. The sequel to an exceptional restaurant. It’s nice to see that Kabab-U-Like has catered for drunk neanderthals by breaking the title up into easy to pronounce noises. It makes me picture a semi-functioning drunk 30-something, stumbling in to Kabab-U-Like II and bashing the counter and demanding a slice of rotating, generic grey animal tissue by shouting, “Kebab me like! Kebab taste good!” Ugh.

The menu for Kebab-U-Like II, and many other takeaway places, but especially Kebab-U-Like II, reads a lot like an Allen Ginsberg poem. There’s a fine line between descriptive and graphic and takeaways like to freely prance backwards and forwards across that line, thus sentences like, “Just waiting to burst” and “Extra taste” are included on the menus.

Personally, I’ve never been able to comprehend how “Just waiting to burst” could be a good thing, but then again, I’m not too keen on the names “Meat Feast” and “The Big Dripper” and they’re two of Best Kebab II’s most popular dishes, apparently.

So my advice to students: specifically go out of your way to find takeaways with numbers at the end of the title. In the industry (the takeaway industry, obviously), numbers are like big greasy, congealing medals. Generally, the higher the number, the more classy the takeaway, so be sure you buy your “Big Dripper” from a quality takeaway.

Recommendations: Kebab-U-Like 2, Chick Chicken, Chick Chicken II, Best Kebab II, Student Pizza, Student Pizza II,  Fat Mess’ Bar & Kebab 7, Buck Chicken, Fester’s Chicken.

Guide to being a Student: Part 1

Taken from http://nosoapradiopolka.co.uk

I can’t believe it’s been three years already. I remember my first week of student life so vividly. I never thought I’d get used to all the partying and experimental sex I somehow never got around to doing, but somehow I did. And now it’s time to go forth and work in retail.

Within these last few months, never before have I heard so many people say the same thing: “Looking forward to going out into the real world?” I sure am, I want to be a real go getter like yourself. I’m done with my stereotypical life of drinking, fornicating and stealing traffic cones, give me whatever’s making you so happy.

I guess it’s finally time to step out into the real world and put my BA in Creative Dog Walking to good use, but until then, here are some handy tips for any soon to be students out there.

The First Few Months

Without adult supervision, some students will spend the first 3 or so months  pushing the limits of over-indulgence and vileness. Drinking coke and eating pot noodles for breakfast will become commonplace. Students have been waiting 15 years to re-enact scenes from Home Alone, but this is the first time they’ve actually been able to get away with it. The only difference is, the novelty wore off for the boy in Home Alone. Oh, and also he’s like 10 years-old.

Yes, this is the best generic student picture I could find. That's me in the middle by the way - I don't know those two girls.

“You know what would be awesome? Like, totally crazy, yeah!? Sticking marmite, coco pops and lager in the bloody blender!”

Now, this is the kind of thing you should be doing. First impressions are important, so do stupid things. Stupid things will make you popular.

These months are also the time you should be decorating your walls with free crap you got at the freshers fair, so plaster your walls in film posters for films you haven’t seen and crap bands you’ll never listen to.

Identities

University is the perfect time to adopt other people’s identities. As a student, you’ll have to adopt an identity if you want to be at all popular. In this post we’ll be focusing on middle class rudeboys, who are identifiable by their fondness for words like “yeah” “wicked” “man” “mashed” and also their love for getting mashed.

Although their diction is poor and despite their tendency to communicate using incoherent ticks and vague noises, a posh accent is still sometimes present. These people aren’t rudeboys in the traditional sense, but are so called due to their recent interest in Bob Marley and weed. However, more and more frequently, middle class rudeboys will listen to drums and bass or dub step.

Rory Cochrane in Dazed and Confused: An Inspiration to so Many.

But first, irrespective of identity, you’ll want to create a heroic monument of used cans and bottles to show other twats how much alcohol you and your housemates can consume in year. Popular formations include: pyramid of lager cans, mantelpiece of spirit bottles and The Tower ©.

The Middle Class Rudeboy

If you want to be a middle class rudeboy in uni, it does help if you have previous rudeboy experience, although it’s not essential. To be a successful middle class rudeboy, it’s advisable to wear loose fitting clothes. A hoody and a baggy pair of jeans will usually suffice, although, to complete the look further, you could add a beanie or rastafarian hat.

Don’t worry if you suspect that you could be a moron, it’s likely that your new uni friends will think you’re a legend or possibly even a “ledge”. In fact, the more ridiculous you behave, the more people will like you. Your obnoxious habits and lack of coherence doesn’t make you annoying, it makes you “mental!”, which is a good thing.

Decorate your house/flat with awful weed paraphernalia, Family Guy posters and iconic imagery of Bob Marley. This will allow you to remember your incredibly vague sense of identity if you happen to get too stoned to remember who you are.

Drugs

Before you take your first steps as a student, it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the cool drugs to take. Fortunately, all students take the same drugs. You’ll want to start taking pills, obviously, and ketamine, and weed. These drugs can be obtained easily from dodgy looking men on the street with badly designed business cards. Look out for cards with comic sans, clip art balloons, palm trees or other unrelated imagery printed across them. These little pictures, I’m assuming, denote fun, or something, because clip art balloons are fun like narcotics, I guess.

The last card I received was for a service called, “The Partymen”, which was supposedly for all my party needs. It was roughly a year ago when I was mistaken for someone who looked like they enjoy having fun, “You student, yeah? We got ket, we got weed, we got all your party needs, you get me?” Well, usually, the only need I have at a party is the need to immediately leave.  A night spent inside staring at the balloons on this business card sounds like a more entertaining prospect. But having said that, I’ll have a copious amount of ketamine please!

Lastly, when you take the drugs, be sure to talk about all the other times you took drugs. People might not look like they’re interested in what you have to say, but it’s probably just the drugs altertering your perception of how interested they are.

Clubs/Club Nights

All the best clubs/club nights are called things like “Evolution” “Synergy” “Space” “Determination” and “Ethos”. There’s a particularly classy student night at Cardiff University called “The Lash” or possibly just “Lash”, which is definitely the kind of place you should be attending. Anything with an impressive sounding word that has absolutely nothing to do with the club is bound to be a popular club/club night.

If I had a student club night, I think I’d call it “Facility” because it sounds impressive even though it essentially means “building with a purpose”. “Anyone goin’ to Facility tonight? S’gonna be brutal.” Now, see, that’s a going to be a popular club night.

So that’s pretty much it for now. These tips should help you through at least the first 6 months of uni. Just be sure to attend uni enough to collect your student loan so you can buy clothes and drugs and shit.