Documentarians and Idiots

I’m scheduled to see Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story tonight, but other documentarians are already in the streets here in New York City, where the libertarian makers of the anti-green film Not Evil, Just Wrong were shooting a scene at the site of a carbon-rationing conference, while nearby minions — at least a dozen of them, it appeared — of the antiglobalization pranksters called the Yes Men (or allies of them) were distributing fake (non-jokey-looking and thus likely lawsuit-worthy) New York Posts denouncing climate change.

But more about all that in other venues (I hope). Here, let me just note that Oliver Stone also has an anti-capitalist documentary coming out this year, lauding Hugo Chavez (not to mention a financial-crisis-related sequel to Wall Street coming out next year). And lest we take Stone too seriously, let’s stop to remember that this was his first film: Seizure, featuring a homicidal Herve Villechaize.

This is, of course, only the second-weirdest Herve Villechaize film, though, since he was also in The Forbidden Zone, the black and white early-80s film inspired by 1920s cartoons, featuring him as the king of the Sixth Dimension and Oingo Boingo as Satan and his Cab Calloway-singing lackeys. (And frankly, the original, grittier TV-movie version of Fantasy Island was a tad stranger than the subsequent series, too, with a more badass Mr. Roarke willing to fire a rifle at a man whose fantasy was to be hunted. Despite what the series later implied, he was no angel in the beginning.)

But for real horror, I recommend making a film — whether fictionalized or documentary — about this terrifying real-life incident, and its name must of course be: Horrorcore.