The Greasy Strangler (2016)

Director: Jim Hosking

Screenplay: Toby Harvard and Jim Hosking

Cast: Michael St. Michaels as Big Ronnie; Sky Elobar as Big Brayden; Elizabeth De Razzo as Janet; Gil Gex as Big Paul

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) # 238

 

Do you like oily grapefruit?

Hosking's first real appearance on peoples' radars was probably his segment for The ABCs of Death 2 (2014), a bizarre piece of an older man and his grandson that could be seen as a prototype to The Greasy Strangler. Etched in a strange world of curious dialogue ticks and a joke relaying on a micro-penis, it was set up to a directorial style with an acquired taste, to which The Greasy Strangler tops it by stripping naked and covering itself head-to-toe in grease as the titular strangler does.

And oddly, whilst an American set film, a middle America in which Hosking's next door neighbours include John Waters and Todd Sheets, the director/co-writer is British with this film partially funded by the British Film Institution. It is actually not that odd an idea as, with Hosking an outsider, his take on middle of the road Americana, is shot and put together with a tick of banality we British are accustomed to in our humour. This is not necessarily a film built from this ideal entirely, taken to an extreme in just the obsession with extremely greasy food, and likewise expectations are subverted.

What is immediate is the idiosyncratic dialogue, a compelling mix of banality and weird turns of phrase with a filthy mouth. It is the aspect that adds to Hosking's already developed auteurism, but is also likely to put someone off before you even get to the fact that there is so much nudity and luridness. The world here is banal, in which a middle aged son Brayden (Sky Elobar) and his father Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels) have a disco tour, mostly made up and dragging confused patrons to random rundown streets where Ronnie claims a doorway was where the Bee Gees came up for the lyrics for Saturday Night Fever. One of the few patrons not put off by Ronnie, Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo), develops a romance with Brayden which develops into a soured romantic triangle, complicated by the fact the father is also the "Greasy Strangler", a killer who covers himself in grease head-to-toe and is in a berserker state of incredible superhuman strength, closer to a troglodyte than human, when he kills his victims, strong enough to choke someone that their eyeballs pop out. It is already a weird tale of psychodrama, between father and son where the father looks down on the son as an albatross, whilst the son is a sweet hearted figure who aspires to become a pulp fiction author, but there is also the deliberate grossness. A lot of this is, unconventionally, progressive in how, even if play for humour or repulsion, these are not conventional characters to see nor conventional ways to mortify the audience, just in terms of the ridiculous amounts of (fake) penis on display. 

The John Waters comparison is apt in that Hosking clearly admires misfits and outsiders, deliberately touching upon grossness and weirdness but with admiration for them. It is not just gross, but gruelling in the amounts of slimy grease, the fake penises exaggerated and seen many times, even in a see-through disco cat suit which no one bats an eye at. The sexual references and perversities are weird, and yet also one of the funnier and weirder moments is what feels like a five plus minute scene in the streets of a father and son just calling each other a "bullshit artist" over and over. What helps with this is that there is a nuisance to The Greasy Strangler, that is idiosyncratic to itself and found in scenes like the first strangulation sequence, where actor Sam Dissanayake (who will thankfully appear in An Evening with Beverly Luff Lin (2018), Hosking's follow-up, in a larger role) steals the scene with his comments on needing paprika crisps for his beau and erectile dysfunction.

This film is not really horror per say, baring that you do see a man eat another man's eyeballs after cooking freshly acquiring a pair, and the comedy is strange, a curious tone affected as much by the aesthetic, which is definitely Hosking's own style. His taste in aesthetic (gaudy costumes for example) is drastically contrasted to very natural rundown environments, matched by an investment in protracted scenes. It is arguably comedy of awkwardness, a trope that has grown in the 2000s onwards of deliberately stretching scenes to excruciating time spans until that becomes funny again. The result means that the final product becomes even weirder.

The really interesting factor about the film is the character of Janet, who could have made The Greasy Strangler deeply problematic or a really complex take on masculinity, as whilst merely a crotchless purple disco cat suit, and olive oil related sex, is enough for her to be as enticed by Ronnie as with his son, she is never seen as a bad person, just one who finds herself unfortunately caught up within the duo's incredibly complex relationship. Elizabeth De Razzo is just as good as Janet, willingly as a larger figured woman to do explicit nude scenes which have kinks and quirks, including Ronnie watching her pee, and playing a character who is utterly lovable. Even when she has seemingly become problematic, when she starts romancing Ronnie instead, it feels upon revisiting more her becoming playfully part of this family's web, her heart with his son but Ronnie an animal. [Major Spoilers] Even when Ronnie and Brayden kill her, baring their dismissive comments later part of their reconnection, it feels more from the fact that, part of their dark tragedy slash perverse father and son bonding experience, they connected finally but unfortunately by Brayden completely sacrificing his sensitive side to become a naked grease covered beast his father would be proud of. More so as in a bizarre epilogue, their ending ends in explosions coming from the heads of their former selves as their new forms wander off in the wilderness to live. [Spoilers End]. Janet also proves the human cog in a film where everyone is quirky, even the blind carwash attendant obvious to the fact his friend Ronnie cleans up after strangling at his workplace. Whilst this film is going to get a variety of reactions, even to what her narrative trajectory becomes, which is for each viewer to consider, it is befitting the sole woman in the main cast, with a pig nosed man and lecherous grease fixated ones, turns out to as the sanest person there. Even if her back-story involves a boyfriend named Rico and she is game for kink, including fingers up buttholes, the narrative changing when the sanest person does feels more respectful for her then if she was entirely separate to it.

It would be criminal to not mention the score by Andrew Hung, one half of the British band Fuck Buttons, whose work here is just as strange, a gem which is conventional electronic based music, which at times sounds like a children's show score, but adds one of the oddest touches of the entire film, even over the rest of the bizarre content, with the wordless chipmunk vocals. It adds so much to a film whose logic as what it is aline, of there being no police (baring Ronnie posing as one with just a moustache just to throw off his son), and eventually ending as a film with an abrupt firing squad as personalities split from each other. The result is a film that I found immediately compelling. As someone who also really liked An Evening with Beverly Luff Lin, Jim Hosking has won me over, and if Beverly Luff Lin is a sweeter if perverse turn on a romantic comedy, than this is the other side of his of dirty and filthier weirdness. I can appreciate them both, beyond just cult films, to be precisely put together and perfectly executed.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Silly/Surreal/Weird

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

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)

 

Director: Jim Hosking

Screenplay: Jim Hosking and David Wike

Cast: Aubrey Plaza as Lulu Danger; Emile Hirsch as Shane Danger; Jemaine Clement as Colin Keith Threadener; Matt Berry as Rodney von Donkensteiger; Craig Robinson as Beverly Luff Linn; Zachary Cherry as Tyrone Paris; Sky Elobar as Carl Ronk; Jacob Wysocki as Lawrence Doggi; Sam Dissanayake as Adjay Willis

An Abstract List Candidate

It was a pleasure to bring you tampons.

Following on from The Greasy Strangler (2016), director-writer Jim Hosking's transgressive horror-comedy with grotesque humour and large quantities of grease, how do you follow up an idiosyncratic debut feature? This is where the "second album syndrome" issue arises, a concept found in music (hence my choice in term) and other art in how, after your first work catches public attention, having to follow it up and with far less time for the project to digest can lead to disappointment from the audience. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is as strange and idiosyncratic, but there is no male penises, no gore or very explicit sex (baring one scene), and especially no grease. What it is instead is a perverse take on a romantic comedy starring recognisable actors. Something which fits and already paints a unique world Hoskins has created for himself, assisted by co-writer David Wike, but of a different mood.

Lulu (Aubrey Plaza) is the tired wife of Shane Danger (Emile Hirsch), manager of a coffee shop who fires her when upper management demands he cuts a staff member. Left, as a result, by herself watching television at home, she witnesses an advertisement for "a magical night" with Beverly Luff Linn (Craig Robinson), a figure from her past with clear endearment for. Taking advantage of Shane's decision to rob her brother Adjay Willis (Sam Dissanayake), at his vegan food store, of a large sum of money, she takes the money and the man Colin (Jemaine Clement) meant to retrive it back, taking them both to the hotel where Beverly Luff Linn's show will be at. Luff Lin is as weird as The Greasy Strangler, but much more reliant on the dialogue and tone, becoming stranger in a more subdued way. Jim Hoskins' style is fully unique, a minimalistic tone of awkward long takes and crassness which is yet precise.

Not as many people here wander around in just Speedos or nude, though Clement does get to exhibit his manly hair covered form for compensation. However most of what came before in the previous film is here, a contrast between the modernity of real life and it being twisted into a curious form, a lush if gauche aesthetic dominating a film almost entirely set in timeless middle urban America, mostly set at the hotel where the narrative is a boiling pot of emotions and eccentric characters bashing into each other or throwing out insults. Among such figures is Beverly Luff Linn, who is possibly dead or at least in a strange limbo form where his manager and potential lover Rodney von Donkensteiger (Matt Berry) has to least lace his Earl Grey tea with a drug and delay the magical evening's performance due to health issues. That Lulu's presence is affecting Beverly is adding greater tensions for von Donkensteiger which will lead to conflict, especially as her husband with his employees, in wigs, will be looming around the hotel when they know where the money and she went.

A lot of the humour is exaggerating the oddness of human behaviour, with some grossness though toned down from the previous film also with the same tone adding sympathetic light hearted in the midst of this. The only mean thing about Beverly Luff Linn, for all its swearing, is the cast constantly calling each other fat, which might be held as body shaming were it not for Hosking being a director with a much more open minded and thoughtful habit of casting actors of all shapes and sizes, everyone distinct even if as much part of the joke in their absurdness, the result of which causing the use of being fat as an insult taking on the strangeness as childish school ground insults from adults. Hosking's logic as a result can make a joke of Lulu asking Colin to go for tampons for a "heavy flow" come off not as a cheap gross joke but something odder in the punch line, and it says a great deal that the film could jettison the grease and transgression of the previous film, and retain its strangeness.

It is a film that will be more difficult for many to appreciate, truly the difficult second project as it does not have the instant saleability, paradoxically enough, of being so shocking you have to see it. It instead has a different form of weirdness in how the little details are meant to be jokes even if a curious ha-ha form, like the coffee shop selling a mid-winter blend. As well, the fact the director Hoskins is British, using American iconography, also means that a lot of the film and the previous is likely drawing from a very quaint absurdity part of our humour. That and, for a film set in the middle of middle America, the punch line being the magical night involving Scottish songs lamenting becoming a football referee becomes funnier in its co-production context, stranger in hindsight the longer I think of the film, weirder than its post-relevant disco music or the main receptionist at the hotel having a long hair that gets him mocked as looking like a dog. The cast including recognisable figures also does emphases the genesis of this film's humour - case in point, if you recognise Matt Berry's voice, think of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) and how people who use subtext are cowards - whilst emphasising that, for all its droll and oddly paced humour, the film's melodrama is never merely ironic, but actually sincere in its perverse way. As a result, whilst The Greasy Strangler was a compelling piece, the sophomore production is the one that won me over to Jim Hosking entirely.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Vulgar/Weird

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