All 'Until Dawn' screenshots courtesy of Sony

As a man who missed out on the myriad horrors of being cool in my teenage years, Until Dawn is a detailed simulator of what it's like to be surrounded by abhorrent assholes desperately trying to get someone to huff on their dick.

They're out in the snow at a creepy old lodge, away from the prying eyes of their conservative parents. "So come on love let's get the babs out, come and have a spin on the creaky flagpole." (Actual in-game dialogue may vary.) The UK has always been fairly accommodating towards kids who want to get drunk, which makes it weird when faced with the classic American trope of characters in their early 20s behaving like stupid horny babies.

Still, the first hour of Until Dawn is mostly just trying to stop people from behaving like absolute dickheads. The girls call each other whores, the boys puff their chests out and unironically call each other "bro," and it feels like a struggle just to stop things from escalating. And that's before anyone has even been killed.

Weirdly, I can't stop looking out for them. Some of these people are just irritating pricks, and yet I still go out of my way to try and protect them from the murderer that's hunting them down. The game mostly plays out as a series of choices—much like in Telltale's The Walking Dead—except with one big difference: These choices completely change the story. It's possible to finish Until Dawn without any of the characters dying. I've already lost quite a few.

But here's the thing: I still don't even really know what this game is. These aren't the classic morality choices that games have trained us to expect. Occasionally you're faced with awful decisions that don't appear to have any kind of positive outcome, but mostly you're presented with a series of choices where the best you can do is stop them acting like pricks.

Hey maybe you should point a gun at this girl as a joke? I dunno lol. That's Until Dawn in a nutshell—and what the fuck is that about? The whole game is like an endless negotiation between a horror movie writer and a squeamish prude—characters endlessly gravitate towards danger, and the best you can do is gently steer them away. They're unknowingly desperate to do all the stupid things that people do in horror movies before they get killed, and the role I've given myself in this scenario appears to be somewhere between God and everybody's dad.

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Related: Watch VICE's new documentary on Mr. Cherry, Japan's leading world record holder.

Read on Motherboard: 'Super Mario Maker' Almost Convinced My Girlfriend to Like Video Games

And then they get killed anyway, the fuckers. What's the bloody point? I honestly don't have a clue, and that's why I'd seriously recommend checking this game out. It's rare to find a game that surprises me these days, but confusion is an unbelievable treat. I'm not even sure what my role is, as the player. I've personally chosen to look after these poor fools, but you could just as easily decide to behave like the director of a cheesy horror movie—shunting them endlessly towards certain doom.

Frustratingly, you don't have ultimate control. You jump between characters as and when the game decides, and people out of your control behave however the game sees fit—the relationships between each of the characters shift as you make choices throughout the game, and sometimes that's the only impact you have.

Making a character insist that you should do the safest thing won't necessarily make that thing happen—it might just mean that everyone else wanders off to do something stupid while rolling their eyes at you for being a boring bastard. But then again, maybe your idea wasn't even good?

Playing through Until Dawn for the first time feels like you're a shit Sherlock Holmes with a job in health and safety, swimming through a mess of red herrings and red flags and trying to work out how best to shape the future. Heading back to play the game a second time with a better understanding of the dangers they face would likely feel like a different experience—if you've the patience to plod along through the same creepy woods multiple times, the replay value here seems decent.

But the best thing about the game by far is a character that I haven't mentioned, and one I won't spoil. This unexpected element elevates Until Dawn, ensuring that isn't just derivative fluff. It expertly borrows from crap horror movies, but crucially leaves you wondering why.

It's a game that quietly plays with one of the best ideas in 2011's Catherine, a bizarre pants-puzzler about infidelity and sheep that didn't explicitly break the fourth wall but did leave you asking yourself tough questions. Catherine used breaks between the game's chapters to ask players blunt questions about their personal views on relationships and monogamy. None of this information was used to change the game, but it somehow made the whole experience more intimate, more uncomfortable. Until Dawn doesn't do the same thing, but at times it pulls at very similar strings, leaving you feeling more involved than you ought to.

Despite the fact that I think the group I'm controlling are mostly a bunch of tossers, after a few hours it feels like there's parity between us. Just as they find themselves cut off on a frozen mountain, I increasingly feel like I've also been trapped—ensnared by a game that wants to determine how much of a "good person" I actually am.

Mostly it's just fascinating and exciting to see something that offers players a new type of choice. Just as GOOD vs. EVIL slipped out of fashion, the same thing seems true for gritty grey moral decisions. Moral choices always pivot personal needs against the greater good, but in games like Until Dawn you're implicitly expected to look after the needs of a wider group of people—it's a fresh dynamic, and hopefully the start of a trend towards games less structurally based on the ideals of an individualist culture.

Unexpectedly interesting design doesn't always make for great games, though—and the real magic here is how effectively I've come to feel directly responsible for the livelihood of a group of absolute assbags. Having given up on Far Cry 3 entirely after it turned out that main character was a chode, Until Dawn has instilled me with a sense of commitment that comes with gritted teeth. Whether or not I'll walk away happier having saved some of these awful bastards remains to be seen, but still, what an experience.

Until Dawn is out now, exclusively on PlayStation 4

Follow Matt Lees on Twitter.

Jesus Christ. All stills and images courtesy Nick DenBoer

I am sitting in the living room of Nick DenBoer's house and he's just served up the best tasting chicken wings I've ever had. Tender, not crispy, with a light dressing that only heightens the taste of the chicken itself. In case it wasn't clear to me before, DenBoer knows chicken.

It's not surprising. DenBoer, along with pal Davy Force, directed The Chickening, a five-minute short film that's kicking off Midnight Madness this year at TIFF. The short superimposes images and animations of chickens, from realistic to psychedelic, over scenes from The Shining. The Overlook is replaced with Charbay's Chicken World and Restaurant Resort, and Jack's descent into homicidal madness is accompanied by a transformation into a giant chicken.

It's actually far crazier than it sounds.

DenBoer has been making insane internet videos for years (my fav is this one). Eventually his internet videos attracted the eye of Kenny Hotz, who hired him for Kenny Vs. Spenny. From there DenBoer found work on a ton of TV shows, culminating in a two-and-a-half-year-long gig working on Conan whipping up demented gems like this.

It's from this time at Conan that The Chickening began its gestation. Conanaco, Conan O' Brien's production company, wanted a demo reel to pitch to Warner Bros for a potential TV show. The Shining was selected simply because DenBoer thought it was the most iconic film in Warner's catalogue. DenBoer flew Davy Force up, they watched the great documentary Room 237—about people obsessed with The Shining—got messed up, and began wreaking havoc on Kubrick's classic.

The end result is five minutes of poultry-themed madness. There's all this crazy stuff like a gruff Italian man living in the tip of Danny's finger, and Dan Hallaron as a green-skinned alien. The bar where Jack is tempted by the spirits of the hotel is replaced by the ordering desk of the fast-food chicken restaurant in which the movie takes place, and every second of the five minutes is stuffed to the brim with chickens. The images are garish and frenzied, like if DMT made a short film. Your eye and brain struggle to take it all in, to make sense of it. Defining the aesthetic is tough. It's like if a professional wrestler tried to paint a masterpiece with a paintball gun, or if you tried to compose classical music with a dirt bike engine. It's nuts and absurd and it all takes place on the stage of one of the most iconic films of all time.

In promotional materials, DenBoer and co. describe this style as "video remixing," the equivalent of using films for sampling. I prefer the analogy Hotz makes, calling it "graffiti." That's what watching this feels like; like all of a sudden finding graffiti on one of the most famous buildings in the world. It also fits the vibe of the project. It's a five-minute middle finger to the idea of reverence and what's sacred. Art is a dump, a wasteland—why not party with all this garbage lying around here?

There's apparently a pretty complex plot that the directors scripted out, and a longer cut of the movie that reinforces said plot. Honestly, when DenBoer was describing the plot to me, I had no idea what he was talking about. None of that came through with my first viewing. My first reaction (and second, third, fourth, and fifth) was, "What the sweet fuck is this?" By the end, though, I was ruminating about how much I think Kubrick would have enjoyed The Chickening.

The short made me think of the aforementioned doc, Room 237, even before Nick told me they watched it before shooting. The doc profiles a group of Shining obsessives—people who have developed complex theories about the movie that range from plausible to psychotic. That the movie inspires such obsession is a testament to Kubrick's craft. In The Shining (as with all his movies), every shot is crafted with such care and detail that one can pore over every scene and still find more. In Kubrick's movies it is in the details where the real story is being told, what's in the background is just as important as what's in the foreground. You can obsess over his movies so much because that's what he did.

That's why I think Kubrick would dig The Chickening: the attention to details, albeit cartoonish and insane ones, is Kubrickian in its scope. DenBoer and Force's craft and imagery inspires one to project their own shit onto the piece, much like those obsessives in Room 237. I thought that the short must have some agenda in it, some sort of criticism of fast-food culture and corporate farming. DenBoer told me that I was not the first to see that, but that I was mistaken. According to him, there was no secondary agenda other than to fuck with this classic movie as hard as they could. The chickens came about because his parents own a chicken farm—they're just on his mind.

Like Kubrick, DenBoer is a craftsman. Though the results may be silly, there is nothing silly or amateur about the creation of The Chickening. We're talking full days of work for two weeks, hundreds of hours, for five minutes of footage. DenBoer's got a real command centre of a studio: Multiple keyboards, huge screens, and batteries—so many batteries, it was like being in a scene from Enemy of the State. His process is complicated and tech-heavy. One sequence he was particularly proud of is the transformation of Danny meeting the dead twin girls, which in The Chickening becomes a psychedelic disco, with the camera zooming around what was formerly a static shot.

To accomplish this, DenBoer did whatever this means: "I took a still image of the empty hallway and projection mapped it onto a 3-D facsimile of the same architecture." (I'm a luddite. He showed me how it all works but if I had to explain it I'd think I'd use the phrase "computer strings.")

Then DenBoer dressed himself as one of the girls, filmed himself dancing and "mapped the girls' heads and dresses onto my body and inserted them into the aforementioned 3D projection mapped hallway scene."

Now that's some commitment. The short also involved shooting new dialogue with actors positioned perfectly to the camera and syncing their lips onto the film, and using CGI to reanimate this chicken corpse into Jack Nicholson's most horrific transformation since Wolf (seen in the top image).

Again, all of this work was supposed to be for a demo. But DenBoer also needed somebody to replace the naked dead lady Jack finds in the tub. Enter Hotz, who comes stumbling naked out of the tub, wang tucked, in a truly horrifying vision I don't think Kubrick himself could match.

Hotz is a both an old friend (giving DenBoer some of his first television work) and his biggest fan. He praises The Chickening with the verve of an evangelical. For him the film is the first of its kind, the birth of a new genre, and when he got involved he made sure that more people were going to know about. He tells anybody who will listen that The Chickening was "a fuck you, like punk rock," and that DenBoer is a genius.

One person who listened is Colin Geddes. Geddes is the programmer of Midnight Madness at TIFF, a genre showcase for people tired of watching actors fake having PTSD and who want to see something more lighthearted, like a psychopath chasing a teen. As such, Geddes is the most powerful film geek in the world. After getting an undescribed link from Hotz, Geddes was immediately struck by what he saw.

"Nick and Davy have taken the concept of culture jamming and the mash-up into another dimension with a wild and irreverent take on a classic," he said. "I knew then that this was going to blow minds if I played it before the opening night film for the festival's Midnight Madness series."

So that's how The Chickening ended up as part of the 40th edition of one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, and I think the fest is lucky to have it. TIFF is, after all, the beginning of awards season, when the film world reminds us all how very important it is and how fortunate we are to have it. And The Chickening dumps a hot load of BBQ sauce all over this haughtiness. Not only is it technically mind-blowing, but it's a bizarre reminder that no art is sacred and that every classic film is only as important as what comes after it.

The Chickening plays Saturday, 2:30 pm at Hot Doc Cinema.

Follow Jordan Foisy on Twitter.

After four years photographing a group of people with crack addiction in Ottawa, I turned my attention to the opposite end of the power spectrum, from the essentially powerless (or at least, marginalized) addicts, toward how actual power manifests itself in Canada's capital city. My new project, "Official Ottawa," looks behind (or perhaps beside) the clichés, the myths and the fairytales that are created, managed, and perpetuated by the Powers That Be.

Funnily enough, during the entire four years I spent hanging around with addicts, surrounded by drugs, and frequenting crack houses, the cops never bothered me once. But try photographing the places where power resides and you get swarmed by security of all types, from busybody citizens, to city cops, from RCMP, to private security.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Follow Tony on Twitter and Instagram.

Screen grab via 'South Park' on YouTube

Next Wednesday, the 19th season of South Park will air on Comedy Central. Millions of people will watch it, millions of others won't. At this point, the show is a genuine cog in the chuckle-wheel that is the comedy establishment, almost rote in its quest to offend and prod. But things were not always this way.

I grew up during the tail end of the 90s culture wars, so of courseSouth Park was verboten in my conservative household. My parents had long ago forbidden The Simpsons, believing it turned an obedient child into a rude one, like those other kids down the street. The ones who said "damn" and "ass" and threw rocks at the windows of vacant houses. This, of course, made it 50 times more alluring.

But by 1997, The Simpsons was already winding down its run as an exciting, controversial cartoon. It had already turned obedient kids into rude kids. But where The Simpsons advocated a mannered, TV-PG hooliganism, South Park was anarchy. In my parents' eyes, it turned kids who were already corrupted by rudeness into the type of kids who ended up in jail.

No matter how much cultural noise was generated by the reign of Jon Stewart and the rise of Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central doesn't owe its legacy to them—it owes it to Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

In other words, the early days of South Park crossed the moral Rubicon. I was scared to watch it. When I inevitably did, it seemed like my parents were right. The older kid who showed it to me may very well be in jail right now. He used to just recreationally steal things. He would go into grocery stores, go up to the liquor bottles, and walk them right out of the store. His secret was his lack of shame. He would simply stroll out as if to say, "It's OK, don't freak out, I'm just stealing this." Of course he loved South Park.

When you step back from South Park as cultural touchstone and look at South Park as a TV show in 1997, it's shocking that it lasted so long. Its cardboard cutout animation was primitive, and not in a cute way. Those early episodes look dirty, uninviting, and disreputable. They made Hanna-Barbera's loveless "were these drawn by counterfeiters in a warehouse?" productions look downright glitzy. It had some of the most grating, belligerent voice-acting ever on television. Its tone was pervasively filthy, scatological, and amoral.

But the fact that my parents, and parents around the nation, knew about it and found the time to hate it meant it must have been an unprecedented hit. And it was. Almost overnight, it was the hottest thing in town. It only took five months to become Comedy Central's biggest show ever, averaging more than two million viewers per episode. The debut of its second season got 6.2 million viewers. (And the television landscape is totally different now, so I hold this up for cognitive dissonance rather than comparison, but Stephen Colbert only got 400,000 more viewers than that on his first episode of Late Night.)

Point is, no matter how much cultural noise was generated by the reign of Jon Stewart and the rise of Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central doesn't owe its legacy to them—it owes it to Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They single-handedly pulled the channel out of a black hole of Absolutely Fabulous reruns and a Craig Kilborn-helmed Daily Show. They defined the network. They gave Comedy Central a reason to exist.

Without that historical context, the things South Park got away with and continues to get away with look impossible. They were able to jump right over the usual ascent to mainstream credibility. They were a multimedia franchise, with toys, T-shirts, and a movie in the can by 1999. They got Joe Strummer to sing for them in an episode. They got George Clooney to play a dog in another. Hell, they got Norman Lear to consult on the show in 2003.

On Noisey: Noisey Would Like to Be Shit on by South Park Too, Please

And while it's easy to reduce the sordid story of Isaac Hayes's role in the series to the Scientology fiasco and the grotesque way his character was killed off, the fact that he was on the show for a decade is ultimately insane. Isaac Hayes is the man who co-wrote "Soul Man," "Hold On, I'm Comin'," and "When Something is Wrong with My Baby" for Sam & Dave. Without Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave might not have even happened. Isaac Hayes is the man who made Hot Buttered Soul, the album that saved Stax after Sam & Dave's departure from the label and the death of Otis Redding. Isaac Hayes had to follow Otis Redding, and he succeeded. That's impossible. Then he wrote the theme from Shaft, a song so good that writing it should have been impossible, too.

And here he was in 1997, agreeing not just to be on the same planet as Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but agreeing to say whatever they wrote for him to say. Within a year, that meant recording the defiantly vulgar novelty song "Chocolate Salty Balls," produced by Rick Rubin of all people.

What's crazier still is that this isn't even in the ballpark of the most controversial things the show's ever done. That impossible high-water mark was cleared routinely, owing to its week-long production schedule, which made South Park the first cartoon that could get in the news cycle and kick the hornet's nest at will. Take, for example, "Hell on Earth 2006," which joked about the death of Steve Irwin just seven weeks after the fact.

It lent the show a hyper-topical relevance that no other cartoon had. The get-it-out-in-six-days policy gave Parker and Stone a platform where, if they wanted, they could just up and force people to pay attention to them. They changed the whole idea of the significance a half hour show on cable could have. They had escaped the curse of instant obscurity afforded much of the era's original cable programming, like, say, HBO's Dream On.

But what makes the show an institution, in spite of its persistent danger of being so topical that it becomes ephemeral, is the internet. Parker and Stone inadvertently future-proofed the show against the decline of cable. South Park was perfectly suited to internet consumption in a way no other 90s shows were. They had the early internet's dispassionately antisocial aesthetic locked down before the internet took over. The jokes and pace were loud and fast—it said what it wanted to say as crudely and conversationally as possible. The show's rudimentary animation style meant you couldn't ruin its intricacies with digital compression, mainly because there weren't any intricacies to ruin. This was an enormous priming force toward the mainstreaming of internet distribution. Back when Blockbuster still seemed like a viable brick-and-mortar business, a year before the Lewinsky scandal, people were already pirating episodes of South Park.

As huge as the show was for cable, it's on the internet where South Park makes the most sense. All the moral panic and 90s culture-war opposition seems quaint in the age of streaming pornography. Saying "shit" 162 times in a single episode is not novel in a venue where saying "shit" 162 times in a row constitutes a perfectly valid sentence. What once seemed shocking on television becomes more clearly the work of two college friends trying to make each other laugh. It's all suddenly normal, devoid of any shock potential.

Now that theirs is the prevailing cultural sensibility, Parker and Stone can safely say they got here first. So even if South Park somehow gets erased from Comedy Central or syndication tomorrow, that means it'll be around forever as a historical artifact: a show for the internet before anyone even knew what that could possibly mean.

Follow Kaleb Horton on Twitter.

Sam De Jong's short film Marc Jacobs about a young boy living in Amsterdam who longs to go on holiday to Morocco with his father. Nominated for a Golden Bear at the 2014 Berlinale Film Festival, the film is also a thematic precursor to his stylish coming-of-age movie Prince, which you can watch a behind-the-scenes feature on here.

Prince is available to watch now on OnDemand and iTunes.

It's September 11, 2001, and I'm at USP Leavenworth, a medium-security federal prison in Kansas. My day began like it usually did that fall: I woke up around 6, drank a cup of coffee, and capped off breakfast with a healthy shot of black tar heroin.

With my head screwed on properly, I brushed my teeth and headed toward the telephone booth. That's when it happened.

"Holy fuck!" I heard a voice in the TV room claimed by white inmates yell. "A motherfucking plane just crashed into the World Trade Center... This is great."

The voice belonged to a German hitman named Hans. I entered the TV room and saw footage of one of the Twin Towers on fire.

"Wow, that plane must've been coming into JFK on an emergency landing," I said to no one in particular. "That sucks."

"Fuck no!" Hans exclaimed, as excited as I'd ever seen him. "The motherfucking psycho flew the fucking thing right into it."

I remember finding it amusing that Hans, whose trial transcript detailing his horrific exploits I read myself, would call someone else a psycho. But not believing for a second that the plane crash was anything but a tragic accident, I went to the phone booth and called my mom.

On VICE News: How the CIA Helped Produce "Zero Dark Thirty"

It was only then that the implications of what had happened hit me like a ton of bricks: Mom stopped mid-sentence and said, "Oh my God, Robert! Are you watching the TV? A second plane just crashed into a building in New York."

At that very moment, I heard a knock on the glass of the phone booth and turned to find two Special Investigative Service officers—basically the institutional Gestapo—scoping me out.

"Get off the phone, Rosso," an officer called Russell said. "You're coming with us."

My heart dropped. When SIS comes a-knocking, it's for one reason and one reason only: you are going to the security housing unit (SHU), a.k.a solitary. The truth of the matter was I basically stayed in the hole back then, so going back was no surprise. The problem was that I had about a gram of tar heroin in my right pocket that I didn't want to lose.

"Robert, are you..." my mom began to ask over the phone.

Before my mom finished, I heard Hans start laughing and shout, "We're under attack! Hahahaha. Die all of you stupid mothers. Look at them jump! Hahahaha."

The ruckus Hans was causing was enough to compel both SIS officers to step away from the booth and venture into the TV room to see what was going on. This provided just enough time to grab the dope out of my pocket and shove it up my ass, praying that it was tied tight enough that it wouldn't secrete into my bloodstream and cause an overdose.

"Mom," I said before hanging up the phone. "I have to go. I love you and tell dad the same. I'll call when I can."

All of the inmates in the hole were kicking their doors and cheering, celebrating the falling of the towers.

To make a long story short, I was taken to the hole as part a gang-related investigation. The exact reason and the immediate events that followed are irrelevant. It's what happened from the moment that I stepped into the SHU that matters: All of the inmates in the hole were kicking their doors and cheering, celebrating the falling of the towers.

"Fuck America! " I heard someone shout. "Allahu Akbar!" said another. "I hope every one in there died!" screamed yet another inmate.

The place was completely out of control. I felt like I'd stepped into Dante's Inferno.

"Rob," I barely heard one of my friends say as I was being escorted to my cell. "Did you hear, Cracker? America is under attack." He broke out laughing.

Over all the noise I asked something like, "Why is everyone cheering? Don't you guys get it? This fucking bullshit is going to change the course of history, and not in a good way."

"Ah, shut the fuck up!" someone shouted back at me. "Don't you realize that the government fucked us all? What've you got, Stockholm Syndrome?"

By noon the same day, the Department of Justice had ordered that all prisoners in the Bureau of Prisons who had ties to terrorist organizations or who had been convicted of manufacturing or detonating a bomb be locked away in segregation. Further, law enforcement officials across the nation began locking up Muslims who were on watch lists and putting them in prisons and jails without due process. Six men of Middle Eastern descent, who had never been convicted of a crime, where arrested and placed in the hole at Leavenworth, in the same unit where I was housed.

Looking for an outlet, the angry convicted felons turned on the the Muslims who were in the SHU with us.

In the days that followed, the attacks where all we were talking about in the hole. The events consumed us. And what was strangest was that the hearts and minds of many inmates began to change. It was no longer cool that America had been attacked. Instead, it was about those "fucking ragheads" who did this to us. Looking for an outlet, the angry convicted felons turned on the the Muslims who were in the SHU with us. They must be terrorists, right? We were coming up with arguments to convince ourselves. They must be al Qaeda, we reasoned.

"Hey, you, terrorists," I said to one of the Muslim men detained near me. "Are you a Bin Laden? Do you hate America?"

These were the words I asked one of the men who'd been locked up without cause while doing my job as an orderly. I was angry, and I wanted to lash out.

"No! No terrorists," he swore. "Truck driver. I drive truck."

The man was completely terrified. He was in a cell with nothing but a blanket, and all day and night he and was constantly being harassed by the convicts and the guards.

"Please, leave me alone," I remember him begging. "I want no problems. Please."

The truth of the matter was that I felt bad for the guy, despite my anger. I only fucked with him a little bit, but never tried to harm him. Others were less generous. On numerous occasions, an inmate would walk up to one of the alleged terrorist's cells, place a milk cartoon full of piss and shit at the bottom of the door, and then step on it, squirting human waste all over their cells.

The guards didn't seem to care.

About three weeks later, during the middle of the night, some of the assumed terrorists were taken from their cells and sent to God only knows where. The war on terror was in full effect.

Follow Robert Rosso on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia

Shearing may be an iconic part of Australian history, but it's a dying industry. During our golden age of wool—which was pretty much any time before the 1980s—there were an estimated 30,000 shearers. In 2013, there were 3,200.

Aw yeah, just a trio of handsome lads vying for our (political) hearts. Photo illustration via CP

Perhaps it's our inherent Canadian humbleness—a trait we like to drop into every single conversation—that made us think: we bet nobody outside of our Canadian office has a goddamn clue who Stephen Harper, Tom (Thomas) Mulcair, and Justin Trudeau are. (Except the Americans, who we gave some credit to.) This is not a slight but just a simple fact that, outside this country, the battle for control of America's hat just doesn't seem to make headlines.

With that in mind, we sent photos of each candidate that best represented the dichotomy of each one of them—Harper being serious vs. Stephen playing the keys; Mulcair yelling vs. Tom decked out at the Calgary Stampede; Justin being sexy vs. Justin looking weird in the House of Commons—to VICE offices around the world and asked them to write what they thought of our future/current prime minister.

The results, as an ancient media company foretold, might surprise you.

Josh Visser

Managing Editor, VICE.com Canada

Australia

Photo via McDonald's Wikia

Stephen Harper
This guy has a face like a hamburger. Which at first seems like a good thing, but we remind you the Hamburglar also had a bun-ish face. And he was a criminal force that haunted many childhoods, robbing kids of precious sodium. But, saying that, Mayor McCheese had a literal burger for a head. And he was the embodiment of electoral success. So Mr. Harper gets a pass mark from us.

Tom (Thomas) Mulcair
That hat/beard/plaid shirt combo is a concerning feature—in Australia wearing something like that usually means you're a farmer who exports live cattle and goes to barn dances (we call them bushwahzees here). But you're Canadian, so we assume your cowboys fight for more stringent emissions targets and teach inner-city kids to horse ride.

Justin Trudeau
This guy knows what's up. He's handsome like a fancy serial killer. He'd get our vote. Even if he would later drown us in a vat of maple syrup and wear our face like a hockey mask. Imagine watching that face peer down a camera and comfort you over inflation. God, we hope he's not an anti-abortion racist. But it is always the cute ones who break your heart.

-Wendy Syfret

America (Los Angeles division)

Photo via Flickr user Howl Arts Collective

Stephen Harper
He probably doesn't sit at a Korg like that very often (What was he playing? Metric cover songs, right? Those have a lot of keyboard). Most of the time, he's probably getting wined and dined by tar sands lobbyists, right? So he probably looks like that second picture, which makes him look scary and vaguely Eastern European, like a Bulgarian kleptocrat with a dead body in the trunk of his Mercedes. Probably a "no" on voting for this guy again.

Tom Mulcair
This guy is your populist spoiler candidate, right? I can't tell if he's a rootin'-tootin', immigrant-shootin' populist, or more of a sticks-up-for-the-average-Canadian-worker, leftist-socialist populist. Either way, he's definitely what every straight guy wants his girlfriend's dad to look like when he finally meets him, so probably a "yes" on voting for this guy.

Justin Trudeau
This guy keeps showing up in elections all over the place: The young ladykiller who rises too fast in national politics and ends up a footnote in history. I'm guessing he's from a vivacious new leftist school of thought, and in that alluring chin-scratching picture, he's flirting with me while also thinking up new ways to battle climate change? In the end, that second photo makes me feel like he might come up behind me in a bar and order a round of shots and then accidentally-on-purpose knock my glasses off with his elbow when he goes to grab them. I hate this guy. It's a "no."

-Mike Pearl

United Kingdom

Photo via Flickr user rpavich

Stephen Harper
Stephen Harper is the kind of dude who genuinely enjoys eating oats for breakfast. Like: his wife isn't making him eat them, for his heart. He literally wakes up every morning, eyes bolt open, and his first thought is, "Oh boy—oats!" He eats the oats plain, uncooked, with skim milk. He last had a natural erection eight years ago, and he didn't much like it.

Tommy Mulcair
Yee-haw and giddy up, it's Tommy fuckin' Mulcair! Tommy Mulcair likes three things: huntin', hollerin,' and waitin' outside women's changing rooms while they try bras on. "Oh, I'm not looking!" Tommy says. All the girls in the shop know Tommy. He buys them Starbucks every day and brings his little fishing stool along. He's holding a cashmere jumper folded four times over in front of his crotch. "No, my thing isn't to see the breasts or nipples. I just like hearing it happen. I just like knowing they are there." He laughs to himself. "Hoo boy, do I go home and have some electric orgasms."

Justin Trudeau
Justin Trudeau went into politics when being a professional wrestler didn't happen. He had this whole thing worked out: he'd start face, then, at WrestleMania or something, he'd go heel, and the whole crowd would just go fuckin' insane. He had his wrestler name down to two options: "Screwjob" or "The Blazer." His thing was going to be that he would always wear a blazer, then rip it off Hulk-style—the buttons pinging crazily into the audience—to reveal an orange leotard. He still has the leotard. In the end though someone got him in a pretty rough headlock at his first wrestling lesson and hurt his ear a little bit, so he sacked it off in favour of politics. "The only thing I do a suplex on," he likes to say, in private, "is the tax system! High five! Come on, kid! Up-top your daddy!"

-Joel Golby

Denmark

Justin Trudeau's father (obviously). Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Stephen Harper
First up is Stephen Harper, apparently the current Ruler of Canada, who definitely gives off a tender, hearty, Man-of-the-People vibe. Mr. Harper's meticulously clippered bicycle helmet of feathery grey hair indicates that he is a wealthy patriarch, but not necessarily masculine or dominant—more in a way that says he confidently sits down and pees, and almost certainly sports Walter White-style tighty whities. This high-society air of being pampered makes us wonder just how he came to lead a nation as rugged as Canada, with all of the bearfighting and hockey-based challenges we imagine such demands. Also, we suspect Stephen's political fire stems from his days as the soulful keyboardist in his college blues/gospel group, "Murky Like Maple Syrup."

Tom Mulcair
Next up—YEEEE-HAWW, I do declare, it's Tom Muclair!

Here's a man who takes what he wants, and wants what he takes! The strong cowboy hat and even stronger beard say it all. Clearly a character with a past in something like moose-wrangling or lumberjacking. He does look like he could be a bit of a hardliner, loose cannon-type though, a man who would flinch as little at signing off on a the creation of secret weapons program as disowning a gay relative.

Justin Trudeau
And finally, Justin Trudeau.

This guy has all of the warning signs of a snide, privileged douche (come on, Trudeau even sounds like a Disney villain). He's obviously plotting something, or at the very least, scheming. Also, didn't he play a cliché bad guy on one of those risqué daytime shows like Suits or One Tree Hill? It's unimaginable that this man has gone through life without at some point having uttered the words, "I'll have you know that my father..."

-Alfred Maddox

France

Photo via Flickr user Katherine

Stephen Harper
It's 10 o'clock at night, Stephen Harper is sipping a bit of wine in his mansion on the shores of Lake Ontario whilst reading today's Financial Times. He sighs, folds the paper, looks at the fire burning in the hearth, then turns to his wife and says: "Honey, I don't understand any of this shit, but I am glad people think I do, otherwise it would be much harder ruling the country. Sometimes, I wonder if I should be Prime Minister. There are so many things I didn't understand: True Detective season 2; who was the main character in The Wire; and why did David Carradine trousers fall exactly at the moment he died? Fortunately for me, all I have to do is point things out with a serious look on my face and play a bit of Elton John on my keyboard."

Thomas Mulcair
He looks like he is born on the wrong side of the border, though he successfully convinced himself along the years that he was the most Canadian man in Canada. Every morning, he has pancakes with Maple Joe syrup and four rashers of bacon whilst listening to Céline Dion and the NHL. He is so bored of hearing about Uncle Sam that he plans to pass a bill to call Canada "Uncle Tom." Stephen Harper makes him angry. So angry that he has decided his political agenda, were he to be elected Prime Minister, would be the exact opposite of Stephen Harper's and would include banning Elton John from territory entry.

Justin Trudeau
Predestined for a career in modelling, young Justin spent most of his teenage years looking at himself in the mirror, inclining his head, raising an eyebrow whilst smiling. After signing a modelling contract with Ubercrombie and Flinch in the early 2000s, he started climbing in the hierarchy before proposing to owners not to recruit ugly people. Just before it all blew out, and the brand became associated with vain, soulless corporate management, he left the company to join a cosmetic enterprise: Liberal. Apex of his career: When asked why he joined, he thought this was the moment he had been training for all his life, inclined his head on the side, raised an eyebrow, smiled and said: "Because I am worth it." He is, by far, the most credible candidate!

-Robin Cannone

America (New York Division)

Photo via Flickr user Alan Cleaver

Stephen Harper
I know who this guy is a bit and what his policies are, but based on his photo alone he seems intensely boring, like he works as an accountant and then goes home to sort different-sized bolts and nails in his garage. Maybe he has a marginally odd fetish, like he likes to watch women take off and put on pantyhose, and he occasionally indulges himself in this but always feels deeply ashamed afterward and purges his browser history.

Tom Mulcair
I bet this guy really likes to eat. Like on the campaign trail he'll really be down to get photographed eating a big ole steak or whatever when he stops by Winnipeg. He's got a really powerful handshake, the kind of handshake that leaves you feeling good and confident for hours afterward.

Justin Trudeau
He's a little too handsome to trust, isn't he? Like, he could be an evil lawyer in an '80s Eddie Murphy film. Any politician who looks like that, I assume in a few years you'll have to be adding on the adjective "disgraced" when you write about him.

Spain

Photo via Flickr user Abe Novy

Stephen Harper
There's just one thing this guy loves more than politics: MUSIC. Harper has been self-releasing "do it yourself" CDR's through underground distribution networks under the moniker "Harper Zoundz" for years. This one-piece synth project combines the more mellow sounds of the early-'80s Brian Eno with the harsh noise outputs of Esplendor Geométrico and the likes. All the releases are limited to a few copies and are sold out instantly, considered as "eBay gold material" by collectors. The obscurity of the releases contrasts with the fact that this guy is, actually, the current prime minister. He doesn't sell copies at political meetings so the only way to snatch some is to order them directly on his website listentotherealharperzoundz.cjb.net.

Tom (Thomas) Mulcair
Tom. Thomas. "Bear Claw." "Nature's Best." "The Wild One." Or simply "The Log." Many are the names by which he is known. He hates money, greed, and lies. He loves women and vengeance. For years he has been living in the woods, surrounded by animals and ancient spirits. Now he descended to the city to claim his own place. There's no way to avoid his power, nobody can stop "The Log." Well, there's just one thing: if you get close enough and whisper "coconut, coconut, coconut" in his ear, he will explode and become a bouquet made of a thousand roses. That's nice.

Justin Trudeau
This dude used to date my sister. So many weird stories, I tell you. There's this time when he thought my sister was pregnant and rented a car, bought some shovels and hammers and invited her to the woods, at night. I will never forget THAT SMILE he made when she told him she was not expecting a "real baby." Anyway, the dude is practical, he thinks money can solve everything, even elves. "Problems? Solutions!", that's his motto.

-Pol Rodellar

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Francesco Cristofaro

Screencaps via Wikimedia Commons and Google Maps

The incident: Two people working in a pizza place disagreed on the best way to make pizza.

The appropriate response: Shutting up. There is no conversation more tiresome than what constitutes good pizza. (Except maybe when people talk about which regional burger chain is the best. They all taste the same.)

The actual response: One of those workers threatened to stab the other.

Last month, 21-year-old Francesco Cristofaro was working as a chef at a pizza restaurant called Super Pizza in the hilariously named Fannie Bay in Australia.

According to a report by the Australian ABC News, Francesco got into an argument with a coworker about the "best way to make pizza."

The exact details of the dispute have not been reported, but the argument reportedly culminated in Frencesco chasing the unnamed coworker with a knife while yelling, "Tonight, I kill you!" Which suggests the coworker's pizza preparation method was extremely unorthodox.

Francesco appeared in court on Friday on charges relating to the incident. His lawyer reportedly told the court that Francesco is "a passionate cook that cares a great deal about the art of making pizzas."

Francesco was given a four-month jail sentence, suspended for 12 months.

ABC also reported that this is not the first time Super Pizza has made headlines. Back in 2012, they were in the news after a chef died in the kitchen and staff allegedly stepped over the corpse to continue serving meals. Seems like a pretty chill place to work.

Cry-Baby #2: Two unnamed women in Florida

The scene of the "crime." Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: Some neighbors exchanged insults.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: They allegedly both asked police to file a report because their feelings were hurt.

According to a report in the Bradenton Herald, the Manatee County Sheriff's Office received a call last Sunday to report a "name calling" incident in Bradenton, Florida.

A deputy went to the scene and spoke to the woman who made the call. She reportedly told him that she "had hurt feelings" because her neighbor had been insulting her across the fence in her front yard.

According to the deputy, the woman's neighbor said "that she was a prostitute and that she should provide more of her services so she could afford to pay her electric bill."

The cop then spoke to the neighbor, who reportedly told him that the neighbor was "most likely a prostitute" and added that "her feelings were hurt because the caller was friends with their landlord and would make fun of her whenever she couldn't afford to pay her rent."

According to the Herald, both women "demanded a report documenting their hurt feelings be taken."

No arrests were made.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A woman who had a freakout on a plane vs. a bunch of high school students who staged a walkout because a trans student wanted to use a locker room.

Winner: The cat lady!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Instagram post by Masjid al-Haram

No fewer than 87 people died Friday evening in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia when a construction crane fell onto the Grand Mosque. A Saudi law enforcement agency announced that a total of 184 people were injured.

According to The Weather Channel, the crane was brought down by strong winds in the area. According to a Saudi law enforcement Twitter account, rescue crews have been sent to the scene. Prince Khaled al-Faisal, Mecca's governor, has announced that there will be further investigation into the incident.

The site of the collapse, known in Arabic as the Masjid al-Ḥarām is the largest mosque in the world, and the building that surrounds the structure known as the Kaaba, which is the literal holiest of holies in the Muslim faith. The Hajj, a holy pilgrimage to Mecca that is part of the foundation of Islamic faith, is scheduled to begin in ten days.

According to The Guardian, Saudi authorities are intensely focused on the site this time of year, because pilgrims are typically beginning to arrive in droves. The collapse occurred just before evening prayers.

The crowded site is not a stranger to tragedies of this magnitude or greater. A building collapse nine years ago claimed 76 lives. Structural collapses, fires, stampedes, and even acts of terrorism have caused the deaths of over 3,000 people since a deadly sectarian clash in 1987.

According to descriptions of the scene reported by Al Jazeera, the area is now closed to the public, and crowded with dozens of ambulances fighting the effects of heavy rain to help victims.

A refugee in Calais. Photo by Jake Lewis

With Europe in the grip of its biggest refugee crisis since Yugoslavia violently fell apart in the 1990s, this Saturday, September 12 sees a continent-wide day of action in solidarity with asylum seekers.

VICE asked correspondents from its offices in some parts of Europe affected by the crisis to give us the lowdown on the public mood towards refugees there, what the government is up to, and whether people will be getting active this weekend.

BRITAIN

In the UK, that zeitgeist with regards to the refugee crisis seemed to change almost overnight, with the publication of the tragic photos of Aylan Kurdi, the now-famous drowned Syrian boy.

Newspapers which previously reported that the biggest problem with the refugee crisis was British people having their holidays ruined by selfish immigrants started demanding that the government do something to help refugees. In the case of Britain's largest tabloid, the Sun, that meant bombing Syria "for Aylan."

Under this pressure, the government went from saying that accepting more refugees is not the solution, to allowing 20,000 more to come—which is still pretty pathetic.

This weekend sees a massive demonstration descend on London, which seems to have been called by someone random and gone totally viral. The idea is to pressure the anti-immigrant Home Secretary Theresa May before she goes to an EU emergency meeting next week.

Arsenal has announced £1 [$1.50] from every ticket for their Premier League game against Stoke will be donated to victims of the crisis.

A man holding a far-right National Front flag at a recent demonstration in Dover. Photo by Jack Pasco

Meanwhile, in the southern port town of Dover, a bunch of racist far-right goons are going to gather to demand that the borders are completely closed. Of course, anti-fascist groups haven't taken to kindly to the thought of hundreds of racists stomping around somewhere that refugees might be, so they're heading down there to tell them to fuck off.

Related: Watch VICE News' documentary about life as an illegal immigrant in Greece

GREECE

Had Aylan Kurdi survived his journey to Europe, he would have landed on the Greek island of Kos. His death shook many people in Europe, but the shocking reality isn't new for Greece; countries at the edge of Europe have been dealing with the tragic loss of refugees' lives by the hundreds for years now. But due to the worldwide outcry, some unexpected sympathy is now coming from unexpected places: far-right MP Adonis Georgiadis, known for his anti-migration agenda, and also for his cult following from when he was in the business of selling jingoistic books, tweeted to say that this photo can leave no one unmoved.

As we speak, tens of thousands of refugees fleeing war, rape, and violence are trapped in hellish conditions on holiday islands like Lesvos and Kos, often with no provision for food, water, shelter, or proper screening services. Solidarity in Greece has expanded from protesting this Saturday in Athens, to donating the basic provisions needed to survive that Europe and the Greek government have failed to provide. Despite this, on Kos and elsewhere, supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn are organizing and attacking not only refugees but also activists.

During the recent pre-election debate among political leaders, the refugee crisis dominated but the answers offered by Greek leaders were mostly seen as inadequate.

DENMARK

Inger Støjberg, newly appointed Danish Minister of Foreigner Affairs, Integration and Housing shocked many on Monday by publishing what is essentially an "anti-asylum guide"—a list of reasons NOT to choose Denmark as your destination if you are a refugee—that appeared in several Middle Eastern papers. In fact, various Danish governments throughout the last decade have made it a point to brand Denmark as a destination for refugees to avoid.

For the most part, this strategy has worked as intended: Of the around 3,200 refugees who arrived in Denmark on Sunday, only 668 have chosen to seek asylum here, while the majority will go on to seek refuge in Sweden. This happened after the police stepped back to permit the refugees to travel freely through the country on Thursday, in effect making Denmark a transitory country.

This weekend will see hashtag-riddled pro-refugee rallies in Denmark's biggest cities. Of course, the question remains whether this newly found empathy will have any real impact on the widely criticized handling of the situation by the government. It remains uncertain how the government will tackle the crisis in the future, but so far they've rejected the idea of participating in an EU-wide quota system meant to re-house the 160,000 refugees currently in Greece, Hungary, and Italy in other European countries.

Related: Watch the 'Migrant Crisis in Calais: Britain's Border War' from VICE News

FRANCE

In France, pictures of the young Aylan Kurdi have managed to soften the people's attitudes. French newspapers, on the other hand, have had a slower reaction than their European counterparts. Some haven't published the pictures at all, and most front pages talked about the farmers' demonstration happening in Paris on that day.

Once the picture became widely shared, everyone was understandably shocked and they finally understood the refugees' real situation. French politicians and celebrities started reacting too. Most were sympathetic to Aylan and his family, except for the extreme right-wing parties. Prime minister Manuel Valls, who had earlier shown his opposition to migrants quotas expressed the need for a " European response."

On September 4, 56 percent of French people didn't want the country to take in any migrants. Today, it seems opinion has turned as 53 percent of them would agree to welcome the migrants. On September 7, François Hollande agreed to welcome 24,000 migrants to France under the proposal of the European Commission.

Unlikely sources have been speaking up for refugees. Even Paris Saint-Germain football club claimed it has "a duty and a social mission" towards refugees and has donated a million euros to help.

SERBIA

One day in May, Serbs woke up to the images of hundreds of refugees fleeing from violence in the Middle East, through its territory on the so-called Balkan route towards the EU. Serbia's capital Belgrade and its surrounding parks have become a sort of temporary break-spot for many awaiting smugglers to take them towards the first EU border in Hungary.

As the summer months went by and the state failed to offer assistance to the rising numbers of refugees, an unprecedented grassroots movement has begun to grow. While there's nothing in particular planned for the Europe wide day of action, people of all ages have been bringing food, clothes, and other basics to the refugees, while others started informal playgrounds for children or played mini-soccer with teenagers. Facebook has become the main meeting point for activists and willing helpers. Some went a step further and organized a symbolic "cutting" of a barbwire fence put up by the Hungarian government in a bid to prevent the refugees from entering the country en masse.

However we do have our share of creeps who wanted to make a quick buck, taxi drivers charging hundreds of euros for a journey worth ten, and others selling bottled water at ten times its normal price. The state has failed for months to offer any real solution for the refugees' passage, and they're not interested in staying in this country, with its unstable economy and low wages. There are still some right-wing nationalists, a hangover from the bloody wars of the 1990s, but thankfully they're not numerous enough to cause real problems.

Related: Watch Italy's Mediterranean Mass Grave: Europ or Die from VICE News

ITALY

In Italy, the official debate on immigration still appears embarrassingly fixed on the most trivial aspects of the crisis. Even after the photo of Aylan Kurdi emerged, discussions centered around the use of the images: Italy's biggest media outlets debated whether or not to run the photo of the drowned Syrian boy, but no real political action was taken.

Italian Premier Matteo Renzi, who has long asked for a bigger EU commitment on the immigration issue, said that "Europe cannot lose face" over the refugees, adding that his government will never give on up "on saving a human life for a few more votes." However, this is the same government that shut down the rescue operation Mare Nostrum—a year-long naval operation that has saved more than 100,000 migrants—because it had become too unpopular and cost too much.

At the height of the hypocrisy, even Matteo Salvini—leader of the Lega Nord party, and one of the harshest critics of immigration in Italy—said he was willing to host a refugee in his home. He also made clear, however, that he would only accept "those who run away from the war" and that he can't fit many in his simple "two-room apartment."

But while politicians share their increasingly confused proposals, regular Italians are taking the matter of solidarity into their own hands. In recent months, grassroots initiatives have appeared throughout the country. In June, the temporary suspension of the Schengen open borders increased the pressure on Italy. Migrants were prevented from traveling north or west, so volunteers and activists increased their presence in Rome, Milan, and at the French border, providing migrants with food, medical, and legal assistance.

Nevertheless, the protests against refugee centers keeps making the headlines. Throughout the summer, tensions rose in both the north and south of the country. Last weekend, for example, militants of the far-right party Forza Nuova clashed with police in a small town in northern Italy, in front of an abandoned hotel housing 19 migrants.

Today, a "March of Barefoot Men and Women" is being held in cities up and down the country, calling on Europe to change its restrictive immigration policies.

GERMANY

Germany has been recognized as one of the frontrunners in the current immigration crisis. The government estimates they'll receive 800,000 asylum applications this year, but what's perhaps even more remarkable is a promise made by vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel on Tuesday, stating that Germany would be able to take in 500,000 refugees a year for the foreseeable future.

Tens of thousands of people have arrived in Germany in recent days (25,000 have arrived since last Friday), with 120,000 arriving to Munich in August. Chancellor Angela Merkel has now said that a much-debated plan by the European Commission to distribute 160,000 refugees among European Union states might not suffice. She has warned other member states that they will have to accept more than originally estimated.

That said, the mood within Germany has not been universally positive towards the refugees. Especially in former east German towns, large anti-immigrant protests have taken place as protesters and media question the country's ability to cope with the large influx in refugees.

As anti-refugee protests grow, so too do the solidarity initiatives. This weekend will see welcome picnics, demonstrations, and film screenings. And of course "Refugees Welcome"—the Airbnb of refugee housing, is still going strong.

More from VICE on the refugee crisis:

Crossing Borders with the Austrian Activists Helping Refugees in Hungary

Why David Cameron's Pledge to Take 20,000 Syrian Refugees Isn't Enough

Calling Bullshit on the Anti-Refugee Memes Flooding the Internet