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STUDIO: Shock-o-Rama
MSRP: $19.95
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 159 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Commentary
Deleted Scenes
Making Of Featurette
The Pitch
“Man this is some great weed. OH – dude, omg, you know what would make an awesome movie???”
The Humans
Director: Richard Griffin
Starring: Ken Foree, Lynn Lowry, Trent Haaga, Jason McCormick, Sarah Nicklin
The Nutshell
The proprietor of the most kink-free fetish club on Earth has to deal with a conservative conspiracy to shut his club down while his patrons keep mysteriously disappearing. And people sing incredibly stupid songs. Because, well, it’s a musical.
The Lowdown
I’m actually kinda torn on this one. Objectively it’s a fucking awful movie. Just awful. The concept sounds great on paper; a musical slasher film set in a fetish club inhabited by furries and cosplayers and people who get pleasure from being rolled up into a carpet and walked on. It’s a recipe for awesome. But something got lost in translation.
“After everything I’ve been through, you get me a gift card to where? Happy birthday indeed.”
Well, in all honesty, EVERYTHING got lost in translation. Nothing works here. All of the actors (except for Ken Foree and Lynn Lowry – sorta) perform like they were plucked right off of the street and handed a script the day before shooting. The script itself feels like it was written in Mr. Burns’ room of a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters (The blurst of times, indeed) and the songs (the few of them there are because honestly, the fact that it’s supposed to be a musical feels like an afterthought most of the time) range from slightly chuckle-worthy to cringe-inducing. The fetish club itself is EXTREMELY disappointing – it felt more like CHEERS with furries than some ultra-hardcore house of debauchery. Although I guess to be fair I can see how that MIGHT have been the point, but I digress. Back on point, the slasher aspect is actually reduced to a ridiculously jumbled subplot and the movie mainly ends up being about how mean and evil conservatives are. Which, by the way, is a message I can pretty much fully endorse, but not when it’s encased in a metric fuckton of stupid.
“Yeeeeeah…so, um, where’s the iniquity?”
But, all that said, I have to admit that I found myself being endeared to this ludicrous piece of shit. There’s a wide-eyed innocence to it all. A “Hey – we actually made a movie” enthusiasm that makes you want to tousle the hair of everyone involved and say “Aww, isn’t that cute.” You end up wanting to give it an A for effort and almost give it a pass because you end up liking the spirit of the people who made it.
But don’t do that because the movie doesn‘t deserve it. Spirit and enthusiasm is all well and fine, but to give bullshit movies a pass on that alone is what turns an unknown filmmaker who should stay that way into the next Shawn Levy. And nobody wants that.
A powerful argument in the “Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays” debate.
The Package
The cover is kinda busy, with the silhouette of a guy in a kangaroo suit holding a knife backlit against a giant disco ball, with the title and tagline in red. It looks cheap and gaudy, so it’s a perfect fit!
And where’s George Carlin when ya need him?
In the bonus menu there’s a commentary, a making of Featurette and some deleted scenes. The commentary is actually kind of amusing because, honestly, it’s fun listening to people have fun. And these guys definitely had fun making this movie – that much is clear. I didn’t finish it because I couldn’t bear to sit through the movie again (it wasn’t THAT entertaining), but what I heard of it seemed genuine. Which, I guess depending on how you look at it, could be a pretty scary though all on its own.
The making of Featurette is nothing that you haven’t seen a million times before – basically tells the story of how the movie came to be and so forth and so on. Might be interesting if you actually cared about how this movie came to be, but I don’t, so it can fuck off.
And finally, there are two alternate scenes: one of the big “Furry Song” number and the other of the opening murder.
I guess if you actually liked this movie then that’s the sort of stuff you’d want to see on the DVD, so kudos to them for adding it all.