BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
MSRP $11.54
RATED Not Rated
STUDIO IFC
RUNNING TIME 82 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Commentary with Quentin Dupieux, Eric Wareheim, Mark Burnham, and Arden Myrin
- Wrong Cops: Chapter 1 featuring Marilyn Manson
- Trailer
The Pitch
“Your creepy Uncle Mitch makes a movie about cops.”
The Humans
Mark Burnham, Eric Judor, Steve Little, Marilyn Manson, Eric Wareheim, Arden Myrin, Grace Zabriskie, Ray Wise, Steve Howie
The Nutshell
The film chronicles a day in the life of the world’s worst police force and the people tangled up with them.
The Lowdown
I’ve been struggling a while about what to say regarding this movie. The first, and most obvious, thing for me to say is that I’ve never seen anything like it. This movie is disgusting. It’s revolting and gross. It’s downright weird. And saying that it’s a weird film is a difficult thing for me to say. I once saw a film just about vertical lines (it was an art film). So believe me wholeheartedly when I say that it’s a singular piece of twisted oddity.
But what else would you expect from the same guy that directed Rubber, one of the strangest horror films ever?
Marilyn Manson plays a teenager in it, for crying out loud.
It excels at its weirdness and revels in it without being too in your face in it. While I love Rubber, Wrong Cops is certainly a LOT less pretentious than that film. It also has Eric Wareheim as a cop yelling at a woman to, “Show me your breeeeasts!,” which is so uncomfortable and so funny at the same time.
Let’s also talk about the visuals of the film, too. That’s not something I do, really, but, for a established filmmaker like Quentin Dupieux, the style is strange. See, the whole darn thing is shot at 29.97 fps, or basically just at video camera speeds. That makes the whole film seem so cheap, but also adds to the charm of it and also adds to the singularity of the experience. Although, in retrospect, I highly regret using the word “experience” for something as low rent as Wrong Cops. I know that Dupieux started shooting this as a kind of experimental web thing, but the visuals, along with pretty much every single thing in the film, isn’t something I’ve seen before.
I wish I could say it was a biting, prescient satire of the hyper-militarized police force that occupies America’s cities and towns now, but it’s actually so far removed from any semblance of reality that any attempt of connecting this film to recent events would be silly, pretentious, and a crime against humanity. The characters in Wrong Cops are so damn despicable, inept, and ineffective that, well…what am I supposed to do? I guess just laugh at how weird they are.
And while we’re here, let’s talk about the characters. They don’t have arcs, really. They don’t really move forward. They exist solely to let Dupieux do the weirdest stuff ever. For instance, there’s a cop with an eyepatch over some sort of growth in his eye and he’s obsessed with his music making career. The cop, in order to get validation, has to haul around a dying man and get a meeting with a record company in order for him to do what he really wants to do.
This is the guy, in case you wanted to see his face.
If that doesn’t make sense out of context, I’m not surprised. But that’s the kind of film Wrong Cops is. It’s this weird hodge-podge of ideas and characters that shouldn’t work, but absolutely do. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t. Yet, for whatever reason, it does. This film is definitely not for everyone, but you can’t deny that it know what it is and wears it like a badge.
The Package
If you’re looking for in-depth materials, you’ll be sorely disappointed. We have a breezy, somewhat informative commentary with Dupieux, along with Eric Wareheim, Mark Burnham (Officer Duke), and Arden Myren (female Adam Scott) saying which days were their favorite or which parts are funny.
Seriously. Female Adam Scott.
Rounding out the package is the movie trailer and Wrong Cops: Chapter 1, which is the original version of the Officer Duke / David Dolores Frank story. It’s interesting as an alternate take, but not much else.
Rating: 
Out of a Possible 5 Stars