FRIED BARRY (2021) ** ½

Barry (Gary Green) is a junkie who walks out on his family, shoots some heroin, and gets abducted by aliens.  They experiment on him and send him back home a little worse for wear.  He then stumbles around Cape Town getting into various (mostly sexual) misadventures.   

Fried Barry starts off like a cross between Requiem for a Dream and Fire in the Sky.  There are also moments that might make you think of Liquid Sky and Species 2 too.  If you can’t already tell, all of this is wildly uneven.  There are some really great stretches here that are immediately followed by some head-scratching sequences.  However, if you can make it through the weak patches, you’ll be rewarded with some truly oddball stuff.  The episodic nature of the whole thing may turn some viewers off, but it has enough weirdness here that it’s hard to completely dismiss. 

Everything is filmed in one of those newfangled styles I like to call “Carpenter Chic”.  The camerawork, music, and even the font used in the title sequence is very much inspired by John Carpenter.  That doesn’t quite enhance the overall experience, but I like it when filmmakers wear their influences on their sleeves. 

Fried Barry doesn’t quite click, but it certainly has some memorable set pieces and moments.  My favorite bit was the scene where he bangs a hooker who immediately goes into labor and gives birth, much to her pimp’s confusion.  There’s also an intermission that looks like something out of 2001, and an ending that, incredibly enough, blatantly rips off E.T.  Even though much of this is overly familiar, the film does manage to blaze a few new trails.  I mean we’ve seen plenty of alien anal probes before.  This flick gives us what might be the screen’s first penile probe.  So, it has that going for it. 

Fried Barry is based on a short film, which I haven’t seen.  If I had to guess, I’d say that writer/director Ryan Kruger took what he could from the short and just kept adding more quirky scenes at random till he got to a feature length running time.  Because of that, it plays more like a mix tape of ‘80s pop culture influences funneled into a druggie hang-out movie.  It’s often slipshod and messy, but I’ll be damned if parts of it don’t work.  I can’t quite recommend it, but I’m curious to see what Kruger will do next.