Father's Day (Review: World Premiere)

Father's Day (2011) 

By Astron 6
(Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, and Conor Sweeney)

I have just returned from the Toronto After Dark Film Festival's world premiere screening of Astron-6's FATHER'S DAY. I'm still picking my face off the floor. If Father's Day doesn't explode in popularity among fans of weird trash cinema, then there is no justice in this world.

Like a secret society of demented magicians, the film-making collective known as Astron-6 has pulled off an amazing slight of hand with their new new horror/exploitation/comedy masterpiece: Father's Day. Everything about Father's Day would lead you to believe it's a slightly tongue-in-cheek homage to grindhouse exploitation ala Hobo with a Shotgun. But this is only a misdirection. In reality, Father's Day is an epic farce of sheer lunacy and unbridled special FX mania in the true independent spirit and envelope-pushing tradition of Troma (which is releasing the film). Father's Day is like nothing I've ever seen before, but if I had to come up with a simple analogy, I'd say that Father's Day is like Hobo with a Shotgun meets The Toxic Avenger meets Macgruber meets Lucio Fulci's The Beyond meets Hausu meets Talladega Nights meets Evil Dead 2 meets GWAR meets Showgirls meets Deathproof meets an acid trip through a meat grinder.

SYNOPSIS


To truly summarize the plot of Father's Day is impossible without spoiling the film's deliriously delightful twists and shifts, which I would never do. This summary, however, sets up the basic deranged premise: a cannibalistic rapist who sexually assaults only fathers is pursued by Ahab (Adam Brooks), an eye-patch-wearing vigilante whose life and family were shattered when "The Father's Day Killer" raped and murdered his Dad. Helping him seek vengeance are his stripper sister (Amy Groening), a priest (Matthew Kennedy), and a teenage male prostitute named Twink (Conor Sweeney). I've only described the basic frame of this film -- it goes to places I never would have expected, and I was laughing, cheering, and gagging all the way.

Rating: 5 / 5 Raped Fathers

IS IT SILLY?

Father's Day is, at its core, a farce. Unlike Hobo with a Shotgun, which presented outlandish scenarios with a core of seriousness, Father`s Day is intentionally and intensively ridiculous. It`s a comedy through and through that exploits the grindhouse action genre and blows up all its cheesiest and most stereotypical conventions with the cinematic equivalent of C4. With every act break, the movie becomes stranger. The script, as you might imagine, is a wicked beast that`s hard to pin down, but the dialogue is infinitely quotable, quirky, and sharply aware of its own silliness. To explore any further the depths of Father`s Day's rollicking humor will spoil the movie. The less you know about the plot, the better. Just remember: never call a man a tree.

This image doesn't even begin to hint at Father's Day off-the-wall lunacy

IS IT SEXY?

Here's something I can tell you: Father's Day is wall-to-wall boobs, butts, and cocks! There's so much male and female full-frontal nudity in Father's Day that it might make Caligula blink. Some of this nudity is of a graphically violent nature (men beware: penis mutilation ahead) but for the rest of the time the camera lingers leeringly on female strippers. At Monster Chiller Horror Theatre, we place the bar low in terms of sexiness, but Father's Day more than fills its shameless and tawdry T and A quota.

IS IT SHOCKING?

Holy God yes. I don't need to tell you that rape is never a good thing, but it's also (sadly) true that we've grown desensitized to the representation of female sexual abuse in film. Father's Day turns this desensitization on its head by shoving our faces into scenes of male-on-male rape. You will never forget the horror of seeing fathers -- middle-aged, balding men in glasses and windbreakers -- being savagely ass raped by a cannibalistic lunatic. The gore is excessive and daring, and the scenes of sexual assault are brutally comical, if that doesn't sound to sick to admit. You will see things in Father's Day that not even you own sweet Pa could have prepared you for. Truly a marvel of low-budget special effects.

The stunts are also unbelievably dangerous. None of these actors are stunt people from what I can tell, but they do things on an almost Jackass level of full-throttle, gung-ho stupidity. Midway through the film during a car chase, characters leap from truck to truck and hang from windows -- but Father's Day didn't have the budget for stunt doubles and CGI effects. What you see the actors doing in full frame is more raw and real than any Michael Bay action blockbuster. And it's scary as hell; I am amazed no one died shooting these scenes or got seriously hurt.

IS IT SURREAL?

Hand-in-hand with its silliness, Father's Day is also a surreal trip into a world designed to look and feel like a grainy, reel-to-reel grind house epic while at the same time speeding through a minefield of acid-nightmares and filmtasmagorical stop motion inspired, no doubt, by the works of Sam Raimi. In surreal style and editing, Father's Day manages to embody the paradox of being incredibly derivative while completely and scarily unique.

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At the risk of making grand comparisons, I think that Father's Day is going to spread like wildfire through the genre film community in the same way that Pulp Fiction exploded after its first screenings. While mainstream critics lifted Pulp Fiction to classic status, I don't think the mainstream will cotton to Father's Day. It's too absurd. It's too violent. It's too enamored with the era of fuzzy VHS bootlegs and direct-to-video 80s cheese. But from the conversations I heard in the crowd as we left the theatre, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that this movie is becomes the must-see modern film among genre, trash cinema, and exploitation fans.


Troma releases a lot of crap, but I expect Father's Day to become the new jewel in Troma's Crown -- giving this generation what The Toxic Avenger gave its: sex, laughs, action, and gore.

History Repeating: THE THING about Bad Reviews

The reviews for the prequel/remake of John Carpenter's The Thing are starting to come in. Is anyone else getting a strong feeling of deja vu here? Some THING strange is going on.

On the eve of its release, the 2011 version of The Thing is already garnering plenty of negative criticism from mainstream critics and horror critics. Funnily enough, I'm reminded of how Carpenter's The Thing was also raked over the coals and considered a flop even though it's now held as a classic of horror in the 80s.

No one can predict whether The Thing (prequel) is cursed to repeat the history of Carpenter's version, but I have noticed something peculiar going on. In particular, let's look at Vincent Canby's 1982 review of Carpenter's film for The New York Times and compare it to Brad Miska's review of the prequel for Bloody Disgusting. In both, the critics are complaining about essentially the exact same things. See for yourself.

TOO MUCH MONSTER SCREEN TIME

THE THING (1982) - "Like all such movies that don't trust themselves to keep an audience interested by legitimate dramatic means, ''The Thing'' shows us too much of ''the thing'' too soon, so that it has no place to go" (CANBY)

THE THING (2011) - "Early in The Thing, the initial creature is barely displayed. . . . Only, as the minutes pass, the filmmakers feel the need to show more and more causing an alarming amount of CGI to vomit across the screen" (MISKA)

UNREALISTIC SPECIAL EFFECTS

THE THING (1982) - "[The Thing], which opens today at the Rivoli and other theaters, is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk." (CANBY)

THE THING (2011) - "[T]here's literally a full-on CG shot of the creature standing 12 feet tall. It looked like something out of "Gears of War" or "Doom", like re-rendered video game footage. . . . Universal's new The Thing already looks more dated than Carpenter's, and it's not even in theaters as of this writing!" (MISKA)

NO STORY TO SUPPORT EFFECTS

THE THING (1982) - "a virtually storyless feature composed of lots of laboratoryconcocted special effects" (CANBY)

THE THING (2011) - "2011 crap that's nothing more than a boring CGI promo-reel" (MISKA)

WEAK ACTING

THE THING (1982) - "Kurt Russell, Richard Dysart, A. Wilfred Bramley, T.K. Carter, Peter Maloney, David Clennon and other worthy people appear on the screen, but there's not a single character to act. All that the performers are required to do is to react with shock and terror from time to time" (CANBY)

THE THING (2011) - "It even sucks for the actors (and causes weak performances) because with CG there isn't anything physical for them to react to" (MISKA)

THE ORIGINAL IS BETTER

THE THING (1982) - "For the record, it should be immediately pointed out that this new film bears only a superficial resemblance to Howard Hawks's 1951 classic ''The Thing,'' though both were inspired by the same source material, John W. Campbell Jr.'s story ''Who Goes There?'' The Hawks film . . . is something of a masterpiece of understatement. It's also funny. The new ''Thing'' has been written with no great style by Bill Lancaster and directed by Mr. Carpenter without apparent energy or the ability to share his interest with us." (CANBY)

THE THING (2011) - "Everything that was great about the 1982 version (it was a small, claustrophobic film with strong characters and awesome special effects) is ignored" (MISKA)

Now I ask you, is history repeating? Or did they watch the same damn movie?