APRIL 11, 2007
GENRE: COMEDIC, SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PREMIERE)
Why isn’t The Tripper amazing? A guy in a Reagan mask hacking up hippies?? That is possibly the best plot you can write that doesn’t involve asteroids or oil drillers, and yet it was only OK at best. Oddly, it was the 2nd movie I’ve seen this week that involved a guy in a Reagan mask committing crimes (“The FBI is going to pay me to surf?”). I smell sub-genre.
Strangely, it’s the scenes that DON’T involve the Reagan killer that serve as the best parts of the film. Tom Jane and Paul Reubens single-(double?) handedly save the film from being tossed in the “Crap” genre. Nearly everything Reubens says is laugh out loud hilarious, and Jane is great because his character, like me, finds hippies to be annoying and stupid.
However, Arquette’s piss poor direction kills all of the kill scenes (pun lazily intended), with zero suspense, bizarre gaps in the story (where the hell does Jamie King get that hammer?), and an overall half-assedness in the proceedings. Granted, the comedy angle is the film’s real draw, and other than the idea alone, there isn’t much you can do to make 20 different murders funny, so perhaps he just figured he should get them out of the way quickly and get back to Tom Jane yelling at hippies. But still, it would have been nice to have a decent chase scene or something. If it wasn’t for the gore and some nicely done staging during the final battle (there's also a nice massacre scene, but it's stolen from Freddy vs Jason, and if you need to steal from THAT insufferable pile of shit, you got problems), I would be hard-pressed to consider this horror at all. Besides, the film already lost points in the horror nerd community for misspelling “Freddy” on the poster.
Still, I DO want the film to succeed, as the planned sequel will involve Jane’s character going to Burning Man (!!!) and taking on a guy in a Bush mask killing the idiots that go to that shithole. So ignore everything I said and go see it.
What say you?
You're making that sequel stuff up, right? RIGHT? Because that would be AWESOME. In fact, I'd like to see Jane turn into a hippie killer himself, Punisher-style (except for the part where The Punisher is SHIT).
ReplyDeleteI'm not making it up, that WAS the plan for a sequel, but the film's failure at the box office has pretty much killed any chance of it happening (unless DVD sales are through the roof).
ReplyDelete