Imagine if John Waters
directed Napoleon Dynamite as a Troma movie and that might give you a hint at
what to expect from The Greasy Strangler.
Produced by Ben (High-Rise) Wheatley and Elijah Wood (among others), it
is a terminally weird, occasionally hilarious melding of low budget horror movie
and quirky indie comedy. Usually, I don’t
go for these ready-made cult items, but I found myself laughing more often than
not.
Big Ronnie (Michael St.
Michael) and Big Brayden (Sky Elobar) are a father and son team who take people
on sightseeing tours of dilapidated discos.
Unbeknownst to Big Brayden, Big Ronnie goes out at night and strangles
people while covered head to toe in grease.
When Big Brayden gets a girlfriend (Elizabeth De Razzo), Big Ronnie threatens
to steal her away. Fueled by jealousy, he
then sets out to expose his father as the greasy strangler.
I’ll be the first one
to admit that a little of this movie goes a long way. It might’ve worked better as a short or even
as a fake trailer. However, there are
long stretches that are quite funny.
Some of the humor is uneven and a lot of the jokes are repetitive, but
they hit, it usually results in some big laughs.
The film is helped
immensely by the outrageous performances from the two leads. They are both quite fearless and aren’t
afraid to look or act embarrassingly silly.
De Razzo is equally fine as the object of their affections and gets a
lot of surprising nude scenes.
Unfortunately, the
movie kind of goes off the rails in the third act. The increasing weirdness is inspired, but it
never finds that nice balance of surrealism and vulgarity that the first act
had. Still, it’s an interesting
curio. It might be worth a re-watch down
the road, although it might be more fun to watch other viewers’ reactions to
the film than the film itself.
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