VICE GUIDE TO TRAVEL (2006)  
Vice Films
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I don’t have to tell you that the world is a strange place. You can look out your window or door and see it for yourself at any given time of the day. But to grasp just how far from center everyday life on Planet Earth has gotten, you need to travel to the furthest edges – places that don’t benefit from the cultural horseblinds of cable TV and fast food and cheap porn that the West enjoys. The VICE Guide to Travel, which as you might surmise is from the publishers of the famously snarky VICE magazine, is a DVD compilation of seven short documentaries about those furthest edges, and how people carry out a day-to-day existence in places where, say, the ground you walk on is so irradiated that it can kill you, or where drug lords rule neighborhoods, or where a dinosaur is reputed to live in the local watering hole. Not every documentary is successful in portraying a fully-blown portrait of the location it covers, but each is interesting in its own way, and definitely support the notion that the world is getting freakier by the minute.

Which of the seven docs is the strongest will invariably depend on what you hope to get from them. If you want an angle on the politics and culture of a region that isn’t being reported by Western sources, you’ll want to see the trip to Beirut, where the local Boy Scout troop gets lessons in anti-Zionist propaganda and suicide bombing tips from their PLO-affiliated Scoutmasters. Similarly, the jaunt to Bulgaria, which profiles a black market arms dealer who claims to have met Osama bin Laden and produces a nuclear warhead with all the nonchalant ease of something making a grilled cheese sandwich, will probably give you a case of the doomsday willies for a good long time. But if you prefer the “Whoa, that’s fucked up!” side of Vice’s editorial, there’s a some amusing moments in Paraguay, where the last remnants of an experimental Aryan stronghold are revealed to be a pair of toothless hillbillies, or in Chernobyl, where Vice editor Shane Smith drinks himself into oblivion before hunting for mutant animals on the grounds of the Russian nuclear disaster site (“I have to throw away my shoes,” Smith groans at one point. “They’re radiated…”). For my two cents, I like the serious stuff a bit more than the slap-happy ones, possibly because the subject matter is so alarming that it would be a disservice to give it anything but a thorough exploration. Also, the lighter docs tend to be somewhat inconclusive – a trip to the Congo to search for Mokele-mbembe, a dinosaur that reportedly dwells in a lake, goes completely off the tracks once contributor David Choe downs a few glasses of the local’s ritual liquor. The end result feels somewhat uneven, especially in the face of the solid examinations provided in the Beirut, Bulgaria, and Pakistan featurettes (the latter offers a trip to the largest illegal arms market in the world).

Extras are similarly hit-and-miss: David Cross goes to China to look at black market merchandise sales and eats dogmeat; one of the guys from the Black Lips shoots a psychedelic video in Uganda; and mountain dancer/certifiable headcase Jesco White, who was profiled in the incredible early ‘90s documentary Dancing Outlaw, proves he’s only gotten crazier over the last two decades. It’s fitfully amusing, but one wishes the producers had either gone completely for the laughs or more towards the tone of the extra about gypsy life in Bulgaria, which can be politely described as hell on Earth, or the 72-page hardcover book which comes with the DVD, and which fleshes out some of the most harrowing aspects of each of the journeys. Reportedly, The VICE Guide to Travel is the first of several upcoming documentary releases, so there’s plenty of time to firm up the approach; in the meantime, there’s enough interesting (and by interesting, I mean totally harrowing) material here to make it worth a visit.

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