Todd Terwilliger

If a Viking takes a dump in the woods, does he make sound? Yes, yes he does. How do I know this? Because I made the mistake of seeing Severed Ways at the Angelika Film Center on Saturday.

The premise of the film reads like a teenage boy’s wet dream:

Abandoned by a Western exploration party and stranded in the New World, two lone Vikings wade through a grand primeval landscape, struggling for survival while still in the grip of their Norse ways. An impressive DIY epic, SEVERED WAYS features a frosty black metal soundtrack, including Burzum, Morbid Angel, Judas Priest and Dimmu Borgir.

How could something that sounds so good turn out so horribly, awfully wrong? Where should I begin?

[ WARNING: Stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled. Not that it matters, much. ]

Let me begin at the beginning. Severed Ways is the movie the Society for Creative Anachronism would make if it made movies. For all I know, writer/director Tony Stone could be a card-carrying member of the SCA. For all I know, he could be their king. Certainly, this film would make a strong argument for his kingship, provided the membership-at-large watched only the trailers and not the actual movie. There’s a fine line between the throne and the guillotine, a very fine line.

For a movie that begins so earnestly on the hyper-realistic trip, sudden lapses into head-banging- as if our Viking hero were at once aware of the soundtrack and in tune to it- and lapses into modern colloquialisms (“we are so toast if we stay here” or “the fish is really killer”) are more than just strangely inappropriate. They are jarring. On the one hand, the film feels compelled to show me a Viking popping a squat in the woods but on the other, its going to have him break into a mini-metal dance groove? It does not compute.

After the perplexing poop episode, the film decides to throw in the Pagan vs. Christian angle, first via a flashback and then when our dynamic duo stumble across a couple of monks in the woods. What are they doing there? What are the odds? I guess it was just bad luck. One dies and one is saved, saved for a strange and strangely executed man-on-monk love sub-plot involving a weird washing of the feet, Mary Magdalene meets Beowulf, the Thirteenth Warrior meets Brokeback Mountain.

During this episode, the other Viking was busy getting roofied by a Native female stalker who, when told by another Native, “just make it so they never want to come back”, decides the best solution is to have sex with the Viking and leave him in a mini-wigwam. He’ll never want to come back after that horrible treatment. Never.

Despite being separated by who knows how much mileage of foreign forest, the two Vikings run headlong into each other. Well, one of them was running, running like John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot in Monty Python & the Holy Grail, through the long grass. Nobody sees him coming, not until he plunges his sword into the holy man. So ends, if not the first man of the cloth to be undone by seamen, certainly not the last.

The movie sputters on a bit further from here, ending in a sort of wheeze that I think is supposed to mean something, something profound, something I’m supposed to ponder as I ram the mostly empty popcorn bag into the trash can as I leave the theater and look for a restroom. Unfortunately, that something was lost beneath my utter perplexity.

Did I really watch a guy shit in the woods? Was the washing-of-the-feet code for gay love? Headbanging? As I left the theater and stumbled into the street, I could already distill these feverish reactions into one core question: why the hell did I watch this?

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