Monday: Everything is Terrible!

The Great Satan compiles snippets from 2,000 videos. (Everything Is Terrible!)

L.A.-based Everything is Terrible! (exclamation point theirs) are VHS remix-masters, famously editing old tapes into post-modern works of art. The results are funny, upsetting, bewildering, cringe-inducing — but I don’t think the EIT! editors are pulling those feelings out of thin air.

In truth, the source material — from the fields of cat massage, jazzercise*, Christian melodrama, bygone tech, etc. — was laced with sadness from the beginning. It’s not just the passage of time, either. There’s a delusion inherent in most of them, that the world has to be as lame, rigid and one-dimensional as they’re pretending it is. These people are, in a way, incompatible with our world, and we can’t help but sympathize.

Which brings us, somehow, to The Great Satan. This latest full-length monstrosity from EIT! was stitched together from more than 2,000 “satanic panic, religious kook and D-horror VHS tapes,” and promises to be hilarious and unsettling. The accompanying live show (coming to PhilaMOCA on Monday) incorporates puppets and costumes, too. Things are gonna get weird. Here’s the trailer:

Everything is Terrible!: The Great Satan @ PhilaMOCA | Monday, March 5
Advance tickets are all gone; but stand-room only tickets will be sold at the door.

* I love that MS Word’s auto-spellcheck has not underlined jazzercise.**
**Looks like spellcheck’s not a word, though. What a world.