WHEN A HORROR TITLE SORT OF SAYS IT ALL.

AND THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY IS TERRIFYING.

By now, you know the story of the Russian teenager, whose weird youtube video mashup caught the attention of our favorite streaming executives, and caused them to think, hey, there’s a series in this. The teen, Vladimir Skavinovicz, essentially pitched his short story collection, CRAZY RUSSIAN SH*T, as “Let Netflix show you what horror is like–Russian style.”

Around here we are big fans of Netflix, so when the streamer announced they liked the teen’s idea and were developing it, well, the amateurish scariness and odd surrealism of his superquick video pitch had us really nervous that Netflix had really lost its mind.

We were right. They have.

And we’re thrilled.

Our review of the series is just below, but we can’t just leave it at that anymore.

We have a few new thoughts.

Lord.

This week, Moscow homicide detectives have raided the apartment of Vladimir Skavinovicz and discovered a story behind the teen’s life that might be even more interesting than his streaming series.

YOUNG VLADIMIR’S APARTMENT HAD NO LESS THAN 221 BODIES HIDDEN WITHIN IT…THOUGH THE EXTREME NETFLIX FAN WILL CLAIM NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE DEATHS.

Young Vladimir’s apartment had no less than 221 bodies hidden within it–a feat in itself–and while he claims no responsibility for the deaths involved, his claim, that a Moscow serial killer makes him clean up the dirty work in exchange for pirated movies that are incredibly hard to get, made us shudder and marvel, at the teenager’s backstory.

You cannot help but wonder what turn of events brought all of this about.

As this story continues to evolve, and the hunt for his perceived accomplice gets underway, we will keep you informed, but the backstory on the series creator adds new…”life”… to a series that had already given us the cold sweats and a case of the what-the-hells long, long before…

Refresh your memory on it here:

____

If you’ve been wondering where the definitive Russian horror movie is, it’s out there. It just isn’t a movie.

The Netflix series CRAZY RUSSIAN SH*T is everything you think it is.

It’s really sort of amazing that Russia hasn’t been the focus of more interesting mainstream horror films, with all that’s been going on there. The place is brimming with possibilities, beyond even the military craziness, from Chernobyl to crazed oligarchs to possibly state-approved human trafficking to… random wildlife rushing through the streets at night.

But for whatever reason, horrormeisters have not embraced it in Hollywood. Enter the new anthology series. This is what BLACK MIRROR would be if the creators just completely lost their minds and decided they would just show us an hour of the most deranged surrealism they could possibly afford.

Upfront news: This is on Netflix’s hidden menu so you can’t see it unless you contact them to release it to you. You know how they do it: Support@netflix.com.

THIS IS WHAT BLACK MIRROR WOULD BE IF THE CREATORS JUST COMPLETELY LOST THEIR MINDS AND DECIDED THEY WOULD JUST SHOW US AN HOUR OF THE MOST DERANGED SURREALISM THEY COULD POSSIBLY AFFORD.

And the snowy nation over there is rife with possibilities, both old and new. In the opener, two prospective parents visit an orphanage in Minsk where many of the children have a regional generational disorder of deformed and elongated arms. That’s it. And if you think that would be comical, think again. It is incredibly surreal and fascinating.

The couple is supposed to spend a couple of days getting to know the potential adoptees, but the miserable and vaguely menacing children are constantly putting us on edge with those weird thin limbs. Further pushing things into the strange is the way they talk–some of them overtly threatening, casually telling the translator they would like to break every bone in the woman’s body.

Seeing children, some of them very young, behaving this way is highly unsettling, but when the children introduce the couple to a wild boar that they share their living quarters with, and whom they pray to, the dial gets turned up. When, at the end, the boar talks to the visiting man and tells him how the children are about to kill him, we are left with some unforgettable fusion of a Russian CHILDREN OF THE CORN and ERASERHEAD.

This episode is not an anomaly. The series is definitely excavating the subconscious, and does not care unduly for explanations.

In the second installment, we watch as a giant snowbound icebreaker ship is stalled in truly the middle of nowhere and cannot progress–as a small army of zombies emerge from the ice and begin moving angrily toward the bestilled ship.

The men aboard the ship fight with each other over how to deal with the madness–a vicious conflict clearly begun long before we arrived–but the story launches into overdrive when the men become zombies and we watch as they don’t seem to realize their brains have begun to deteriorate so their arguments and plans for escape make less and less sense… culminating in their attempt to reach a walrus skeleton that one of them insists will somehow teach them the language of zombies so they can negotiate with their enemy…

Yeah. And these are not at all the weirdest ones. In “Model Citizen,” a group of beautiful Moscow models lure rich jerks to a hotel that has a doorway into which the men fall into cylinders of spinning knives a la a grim Monty Python sketch, but the odd part is that in the floor below, a grizzled man seems to be reconstituting the dead victims by opening a door covered in occult symbols from which they emerge fresh as a daisy.

And he then sends the confused men back out into the Moscow night, good as new. The women on the upper floor then go back out and happen upon the men again, evidently trying to hunt them down all over, luring them back to repeat the process.

When one rich young hipster realizes that vanished murder victims are coming back in this way, he questions the grizzled man, why would you do this? To which he responds, “Because this is Russia.” Shock cut to black, end credits.

You start to feel that these are variations on an unstated theme: “Hell in Modern Russia,” where everyone has been consigned to a terrible eternal fate that is terrifying but does not make conventional sense.

Other episodes include such horrific amazements as an insane Mafia don who pays people to drive their cars at incredibly high speeds backwards on a freeway and in an abandoned town which he has purchased for his own enjoyment–and those who change their mind are then tied up on randomly-placed poles as the reverse-speeders try desperately to avoid killing them…

Another story involves an incredibly ordinary Moscow street in which Russian construction workers ruthlessly harass a young woman who lives in a nearby apartment, and while we are distracted by what we think is the main story of her trying to find a lost dog that a frightening neighbor says she will kill her over losing, the construction workers have set up a bizarre guillotine hidden in their scaffolding, and kill her unceremoniously with it… as they reveal they have eaten the lost dog.

There are cults that worship Putin, who seems to be a hologram conducting some very scary business that makes no sense and we can never get a good look at; there are the ghosts of the Romanovs haunting Russian solders who play Russian roulette nightly anyway using guns that fire experimental viruses with all kinds of effects…

And gradually you just let the terrifying illogic of it all draw you in.

Probably weirdest of them all–even in competition with the Chernobyl mutants who have a dance hall and are looking for mates, and the hunting party that discovers a giant worm that eats a fearsome family of bears–is “The Notion of Having Babies.”

In that one, a wealthy woman sidelines a Siberian train and gives a small group of travelers an endless tour of her wealthy home, talking of her terrible loss in childbirth, and then knocking them out. Keeping one man in bed, she treats him, bafflingly, as if he were an infant.

Then later, as the first man awakes in a large crib, he realizes something bizarre has happened to him and the others–they have been given plastic surgery to render them mostly immobile, tremendously fat, and clearly meant to resemble… babies.

So if you want to get your weird on and spark a conversation with your housemates that is not going to end any time soon…get yourself over to some CRAZY RUSSIAN SH*T.