In keeping with Vice's trademark irreverent, sassy style, Vice Guide to Travel is the first installment of a quarterly DVD magazine.
This first "issue" contains six short travel documentaries that screen like satirical Vice magazine articles, replete with cool soundtracks and starring studs like Spike Jonze and Johnny Knoxville.
The series' modus operandi entails Vice co-founder Shane Smith voluntarily tossing himself and his co-hosts into life-threatening situations. In episode one, Smith shows Jonze footage of Palestine, where he went to investigate the PLO Boy Scouts of Beirut. Scenes of children singing war songs and wielding guns scare both of them until the segment ends on their declarations that the world is totally f***ed up. Most episodes hone Vice's weapon fetish. A visit to Bulgaria to buy black market bombs is eerily easy. Suroosh Alvi travels to the Khyber Pass region in Pakistan where one can buy homemade or vintage guns and fire machine guns off the roofs of city buildings. Other episodes lean towards the tragically bizarre. In Chernobyl, Smith hunts elusive mutant animals. In Paraguay, the host searches for an Aryan colony called Nueva Germania, where ex-Nazis supposedly live. Opposite the average motivational travel show, this DVD reinforces our fears of traveling to certain countries.
To what end? At one point, Shane Smith asks, Why don't we know about this? Vice Guide to Travel is an exposé not only of what goes on behind closed doors, but also a statement against American media for covering these dangers up.
--Trinie Dalton
