I finally saw "Help Me Hildy!"

[jmowreader]

This is Labor Day weekend, and we've got plasma televisions on special buy--$1499 for a 46-inch model.

We also got some DVD players, but you can get those anywhere.

Anyway, the store manager wanted me to set one up and play a DVD on it so people could see the TV in operation. It took four of us to get it out of the box and on a table, but we persevered and finally got the thing working.

Now we need a DVD, right? I had three choices: get one from home, go to Target and buy one, or get one off the shelf of my own store and play that. My tastes run to the kind of movies you can't play in a retail lumberyard, so we started looking through the store--and discovered that we sell exactly one DVD: Help Me Hildy!

In it went.

Let's say it isn't very good. Hildy Santo-Tomas, the terror of Trading Spaces, is joined by another woman, whom I don't recognize. She's probably credited on the DVD case but I really wasn't interested. Hildy has been on television for several years, but in this DVD she seems strangely uneasy and out of place in front of the camera. She demonstrates decorating techniques but wears a white blouse and what appear to be woolen slacks--who would do that? The other woman is at least dressed somewhat like a person doing a home improvement project would be, and seems far more confident on film. Their "workshop" was carefully decorated to look like someone's basement...except for the lack of cobwebs, dust, substantial amounts of crap being stored...

The disc contains five segments. I saw at least part of four of them. The first is on preparing a wall for decorating. This is okay--just real basic information on spackling holes and other simple tasks everyone must do to ready a wall for paint.

The three "fancy" segments I saw were on distressed paint finishes, venetian plaster and faux painting.

She "distressed" an oak cabinet. They took this perfectly good oak cabinet, sanded off all the varnish, then painted it black, pounded a shitload of nailholes in it and sanded off half the paint so the piece would supposedly look old. What it looked like was shit.

The venetian plaster is where you could really tell it was Hildy. The venetian plaster technique requires that you mix paint with drywall mud, smear the drywall mud all over the wall, then add another color as a wash. The base color she chose was fire engine red.

Then came the faux painting segment. She took this little three-legged stool and painted it dark green. That wasn't so bad. Then she took some of the fire engine red paint she had left over from fucking up the wall and daubed it all over the green--where it looked even worse than it did when it was on the wall.

The fifth segment I didn't have the courage to view.

In summation:

Three shitty-looking projects completed
Host walking through the video
No code violations

I give this one fifteen stars--the number you should see after conking yourself in the head with a brick after watching this shit.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

1. She "distressed" an oak cabinet.

:rofl: Sounds like it...