Magpie puts this resurgence in interest down to several factors: a new-found obsession with Victoriana, a healthy pre-occupation with death and resurrection, and a need to draw hands away from smartphones and laptops. Suddenly, Steve Carell's mousterpieces in Dinner for Schmucks seem ahead of the curve. What was once predominantly the preserve of older men in musty corners is being practiced by people much closer to the cradle than the grave. Hundreds of £25 mouse-taxidermy kits are flying off the shelves for those that want to tinker at home. You can start off on the small stuff – dissecting mice, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and hamsters – before graduating on to bigger and more exotic things. Stuffed heads are staring from bars across London, and the capital is inundated with classes where anyone can join in with a scalpel in one hand and a glass of prosecco in another. Whatever your take on it, taxidermy is undoubtedly big again.
Her musical performance, described as an "animalation" and titled "Sing for Your Life", is part of a solo exhibition called The Museum House of Death, a collection of reappropriated corpses in gloomy tunnels.Īmong the shadows lurk numerous stuffed dead things: a bird lurks inside a lampshade in "Deadly Birdshade" a fox peers out from behind a pair of specs a lamb unpeels itself from its skin on a video screen. We're in the station's dark, damp Victorian underbelly, in a performance space known as The Vaults, and we're watching artist Charlie Tuesday Gates perform a puppet show using dead animals that she brands "a cross between The X Factor and Pet Rescue".Īlthough Gates shirks the tag, she's one of the more high-profile figures in a new wave of taxidermists.
His scrunched face is contorting and his bulbous eyes are shooting sad and accusatory daggers into the crowd as he sings "How much is that dog you got from Gumtree?" The dog's bollocks are dangling like clock weights perilously close to one man's nose. Parts of his innards are flying out into the laps of the front row of his audience. He's singing something about the cruelty of breeding and the genetic meddling of man, but he's being upstaged by his own decaying body. Or rather, the empty husk of a dog, dangling from the hand of a human, is singing. If you want to have a good laugh and enjoy yourself-see Wild Hogs.Underneath Waterloo station, a dog is singing.
The movie starts off slow and is reminiscent of a couple of failed Tim Allen projects (Shaggy Dog and Zoom), but after about 15 minutes it shifts gear and becomes a wonderful comedy well worth spending the admission fee. This movie was filled with laughs and good gags. Wild Hogs is a throw back to the days of My Cousin Vinny, Airplane, and Young Frankenstein. And in today's movie world, most movies are one joke wonders. I have lately been happy if a movie has at least one good laugh to feel like my admission fee was worth spending. In today's day of poor comedies (see anything starring Will Farrell for example) that do not produce a laugh or a smirk-Wild Hogs is a breath of fresh air. With that said-Wild Hogs is absolutely wonderful. Sometimes I wonder if they are on certain payrolls to give a certain vote towards a movie. I have read a lot of negative response from the same goof-balls that have promoted some very bad movies. Critics have been panning Wild Hogs in their writings.