In my never ending quest to create unnecessary drama for myself, I am considering moving yet again. My visa will be up soon, and so in the name of real estate porn, I look at the various countries and decide that if the house is on an island in the middle of city with its own subway station, I should move there. Then I do. No, really. I’ve moved four times in under two years.

More important than any cheap one-story mansion on an acre of land with a state-sponsored helipad, there is the imperative: do the theaters show subtitled films? It may surprise you to learn that all the intellectual and classy countries are like everywhere else: full of people who hate reading while seeing films. English language films in Italy, Germany and all of France (except for Paris and Lille) are dubbed, which precludes my living there. It seems whatever my desire for a kitchen with an induction hob and a freezer with four different temperatures (for ice cream, dummy), I am, as it turns out, a film goer above all else. So, looking at Vienna, I was grateful to discover, they were open on Christmas (though at a ridiculously late 16h30), and they were showing this:

Incedentally, this refers to the existence of the town of ‘Fucking’ in Austria, visited each day by giggling frat boys. ‘Bad’ means ‘bath’, implying spa hijinks. And also me, if only I had known about it at the time. Getting all your knowledge from films has its disadvantages too.

I didn’t learn German to read Nietzsche in the original, but for Bad Fucking…

But until then, I’m in England, which does show films in english, but violates my religious rights to pizza and a matinee by not being open on Christmas. So having english language films means I can stay, but being closed one day a year means I have to get the hell out of here!

Before I left yet again, I found the lovely Cineworld Fulham, which in the spirit of inexplicable British patois, is in the ‘Asian’ part of West London (meaning Indian, Pakistani and so on). These heathens celebrate Christmas as I do: with movies! And, in the spirit of Bad Fucking, I decided to see a film that would make as much sense to me as seeing a film in language I didn’t understand. I decided to see The Harry Hill Movie.

Who is Harry Hill? I don’t know. I didn’t know before I saw the film, and I know less now. He has some kind of show on TV, I think, and glasses. That’s really all I had going in. I know that the appeal of this blog is that you don’t actually have to see the film in question. And that you’re very bored and so tired that you don’t know what you’re clicking, of course. The added bonus here is that if you live in the US, there’s no way to see The Harry Hill Movie. And that’s really for the best, dear. It is awful, and sort of demonstrates that being funny is a mystical quality, even though I want and believe in a system to describe it.

Read the date, you ostensibly areligious yet only country more closed on Christmas than actual Christian countries country…read the date!

All the elements are there. There’s bright colors, a talking hamster puppet, long sequences set under the sea with giant talking heads, Mr. Jim Broadbent – inexplicably in drag – giving a tour of a nuclear power plant, inappropriately lingering close-up of bloody dismembered legs from dead walking brain creatures, a lot of jokes about child abandonment, and elaborate set-ups about BBQ hula hoops. And yet…

It is so very terrible. The jokes are on the level of idiocy that just having learned the rudiments of language means you won’t think they’re funny anymore. And no, I don’t know how that works. Don’t get me wrong; by the end I was kind of enjoying it. It has a kind of lulling quality of utter mindnumbingness, like what it might feel like to die of extreme cold. It’s so stupid, halfway through, you become stupid enough to enjoy it. Call it Swindon Syndrome.

There’s also the fact that there isn’t a mean bone in its, or its makers’ bodies. It actually ends with a photo tribute to Mr. Hill’s real-life hamster. Come on, I’m not a monster. So despite the rappin’ Grandma and references to facebook (a hamster? On facebook?), and the use of the term ‘awkward’, I felt ultimately like I was watching the 1960s comedies that drove the Mr. Chapman et. al. to create Monty Python. We hate it so much we would dedicate our lives to making something better. But we could never hate it.

And leaving, I passed the only other gentleman willing to watch The Harry Hill Movie at 11a on Christmas morning. When I came in, he was texting furiously when I entered, and I was appropriately pissed at his having ruined the pleasure I get at seeing movies by myself. He had now fallen asleep, utterly passed out drunk.

Sleep it off, my dear gentle soul. Sleep it off.