Tusk (2014)

From https://www.dvdplanetstore.pk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/
Tusk-2014-movie-comedy-horror-dvdplanetstorepk.jpg

Director: Kevin Smith

Screenplay: Kevin Smith

Cast: Michael Parks as Howard Howe; Justin Long as Wallace Bryton; Genesis Rodriguez as Ally Leon; Haley Joel Osment as Teddy Craft; Guy LaPointe as Guy LaPointe; Ralph Garman as Detective Garmin; Jennifer Schwalbach Smith as Ms. McKenzie; Harley Quinn Smith as Colleen McKenzie; Lily-Rose Depp as Colleen Collette

[Major Spoiler Warnings]

Kevin Smith is a director I am openly alien to - the only film I saw in my youth was Dogma (1999), and when I saw Clerks (1994) it vanished from memory at a young cineaste's age. His entire "View Askewniverse" world and cult of personality however is one I will eventually have to return to; a distinct part of his career isn't just the films themselves, but that he has sustained a fandom just from recorded talks and podcasts when he wasn't making films, so there's a lot of personality to consider.

There was always one that would've been on my radar regardless of interest or lack of, when a podcast conversation about an imagined premise for a walrus tickled Smith pink so much he asked his fans to vote on whether the film or not. The result, unless you come from another dimension where people said know, is the tale of a podcaster being violently turned into a human walrus up in the Canadian wilderness, one that proved polarising and bloody weird.

Tusk's origins do suggest pure ironic existence, especially as a piece of the original podcast is laced over the end credits, but the idea of this being an ironic anti-film is undercut by actually watching Tusk, a strange tonal experience of a comedy horror which is still pretty gruesome, still pretty tragic for the characters, and yet is a peculiar and inherently funny premise matched by a suddenly jump into farce. Effectively it's The Human Centipede (2009) if it was made to actually engaging the audience than just making the most predictable results, as nothing in Tusk is boring even if a viewer hates it.

Justin Long plays a podcaster named Wallace Bryton, an edgelord for a lack of subtlety whose show 'Not-See", the name of which is meant to evoke another certain name when you pronounce it and is a plot point in the problems it causes. His show is meant to take the piss out of peoples' strange experiences and people on the fringes he meets, in hindsight really evoking the wave of problematic internet celebrities even if they turned out to be on YouTube and getting into actual accusations of glorifying Nazis ideals. Already this is setting up a karmic journey, especially as dialogue scenes with his girlfriend Ally Leon (Genesis Rodriguez) do evoke how he was once a kind person who became cynical; I have no issue with this character being utterly unlikable as it creates the route to his folly, where his original choice, a Canadian teenage who chopped his leg off by accident making a Kill Bill fan video for online, commits suicide before he can meet him and leads him to Howard Howe (Michael Parks). Howe is an old man whose tales of meeting Ernest Hemingway when he was prevented from joining the D-Day landings in World War II and marine adventure entice the younger man even if Bryton still wants to take the piss out of him. Then Howe proceeds to drug Bryton with his tea, leading to a story where you sympathetic with the agony even a person like Bryton will go through.

Here I immediately give the film credit as, in lieu to being a director-writer who likes his dialogue and famously the man who wondered (through his characters) what happened to all the construction staff on the Death Star, Kevin Smith does make the dialogue scenes in Tusk compelling. It was unexpected for him to remotely even have a tangent to Hemingway and nautical storytelling, but with the help of Park being the best performance in the film, it's a surprisingly mature thing rarely found in horror cinema to have the initial dialogue scenes between Park and Long, made even more surprising knowing Tusk eventually gets into diarrhea jokes too halfway through.

From https://static.rogerebert.com/uploads/review/
primary_image/reviews/tusk-2014/hero_Tusk-2014-1.jpg

And Michael Park does steal the film. The was not the first time he worked with Smith, another of the director's fascinating curiosities being Red State (2011), his first horror film and a condemnation of religious zealot from a man who was Catholic himself at the time, but Park's existence here adds some credibility to an odd premise. That Howe, when he drugs Bryton, is going to turn him into a human walrus companion, in context of a trauma involving shipwrecked with only such a mammal as company on an island. This is where I struggle with just believing Tusk was Smith just getting high and just making a dumb film, as having encountered examples of half arsed, intentionally "bad" films, Tusk plays seriously and only starts getting odd when a certain character appears. Even beyond that, when Park's character opens up as a psychologically and physically abused child who grew up into this serial killer with a twisted modus operandi, it's a dark film at its heart even when it gets intentionally silly, a tightrope between seriousness and comedy that is legitimately strange.

Certainly it gets nasty, where Long has to act in a walrus costume of flesh unable to communicate more than noises for dialogue, Smith to his credit not pulling punches in imagining his mad premise in full body horror grossness, be it the legs of victims being carved into tusks or Park constantly trying to force Long to eat raw fish. Where it gets curious is in mind to this having been a planned first film in a trilogy of Canadian set horror films. Smith apparently likes Canada, plants a lot of Canadian references throughout Tusk, and even sets up the second film, Yoga Hosers (2016), with the first appearances of two teenage girls who work at a convenience store. These two characters, the leads of the second film, are played by Smith's own daughter Harley Quinn Smith and Johnny Depp's daughter Lily-Rose Depp. And yes, Johnny Depp is in the film too, and this is where I'm certain Tusk's notorious reactions actually stem from.

This is the thing - Johnny Depp, as former French Canadian police detective Guy LaPointe, tracking down Howe over a long period of time, is still acting here. There's been a view that, in these later years, Depp has turned into a man who wears strange costumes and puts on mannerisms, but LaPointe is still a performance that required a lot of talent to even pull off. The issue is that LaPointe also sounds stoned with a stereotypical accent, the kind of man who'd be flatulent if you sat near him as he buys ridiculous amounts of food at a fast-food restaurant, and is the entrance way for the broader comedy for the most part. I will hold LaPointe as entirely subjective in terms of whether he's good or absolutely agonising for each individual viewer. Thankfully the most extreme of this ridiculousness is just one single scene - where Depp and Park's characters encounter each other in a flashback and Park takes on a bizarre half mumbled voice, in context to clearly hide himself, becoming near unintelligible as they discuss has poutine causes diarrhea. It's a scene in most films where I'd be goading my eyes out, but here however, it's sandwiched in the midst of a production that has been constantly undercutting itself with curious oddness like this throughout.

In fact, for myself, if it'd been a regular horror film, I don't think Tusk would've sustained itself even with its surprisingly bleak ending, Depp's appearance preventing the conventionality and banality of the middle act, where Genesis Rodriguez and Haley Joel Osment try to track down Long in Canada themselves, but bringing his character in. The abrupt inclusion of comedy through Depp, and Park even putting on his own walrus suit for his final plan, actually adds a jolt of much needed energy which allows Kevin Smith to play off the ending with even more powerful. Does it amount to anything? Honestly, it feels like a lark, but Smith ends the film as a tragedy, skirting jokingly around the idea of human versus beast by way of man versus walrus, only to push it to a conclusion where Justin Long's character is psychologically damaged to the point he becomes a human-walrus hybrid, one which leaves him in the final scene left in an actual zoo whilst his girlfriend in tears keeps appearing to try to get him back as a person. It's a powerful ending, with only the fact that Smith includes the podcast segment over the end credits arguably undercutting the moment. Smith for all the silliness at hand had the decency to still play the film seriously, and whilst this could all be ironic, it's an irony which thankfully isn't deliberately bad, but pointedly allows the film to be viewed seriously. One of the tragedy of a man, a bad man but one who could be redeemed, that is played out as a drama; even the humour with Depp and poutine has a dark edge to it which suits to the tone perfectly.

Tusk as a result is a lot more rewarding than many horror films in all honestly, Kevin Smith effectively taking a bad straight-to-video horror film, where the execution would be average, and everything was played as cheaply and lazily as possible, and plays it as well as he could. His filming style here is pretty basic in presentation, but even if he intended it to be laughed at whilst high on weed, he had the decency to film a premise with a level of quality and intention I wish more films like this had. Sadly, the Canadian trilogy has stopped short at Yoga Hosers, which didn't even get a UK DVD release here. At this current point, the plan is Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019) and a return to the View Askewniverse, which might be interesting or sadly a departure from this curious series of horror films in his career that caught me with immense interest.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Silly/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From https://24miles.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/52718274.jpg