The Weekend Review: Tusk

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

Sometimes I just don't know why I do this to myself.  I honestly don't.  I've only ever been a tenuous fan of Kevin Smith (owing to the comedic promise he showed with Clerks) and have always been leery of the body horror sub-genre (which all too often mistakes shock for scares and gore for greatness).  I guess that I just don't value my time enough.

When shock podcaster Wallace Bryton's latest story falls through, he's desperate for something to talk about on that week's show.  After finding a flier advertising an old man wanting to share his life's story, he travels into rural Canada to speak with him.  But after being drugged, amputated and held against his will, his malevolent host surgically transform Wallace into a walrus: a creature "far more evolved than any man."

The movie's problem isn't that it's a nearly two-hour riff on The Human Centipede based on an off-hand comment from one of Kevin Smith's podcasts about turning a person into a Walrus.  That is a problem, to be sure, but it's not what's at the core of what makes Tusk a bad movie.  The real problem with Tusk is that it has absolutely no idea what it wants to be.

Tusk starts off as a straight-up comedy.  Wallace Bryton is set up as the most despicable, opportunistic human being ever to not wear a Nazi uniform (and even that's stretched by him naming his podcast the "Not See Party" and ending every episode with a Hitler impersonation).  After broadcasting a kid amputating himself with a katana while messing around in his garage and turning him into a viral sensation, the kid kills himself, leaving Wallace without a verbal punching bag to interview for the show.

That's actually a shockingly strong start to the movie.  It's an incredible setup for Wallace to begin introspecting on his increasingly contemptible choices in life (ranging from selling out his artistic integrity for cash to repeatedly cheating on his girlfriend) and the real-world effect of his "harmlessly" offensive brand of humor.  It's intelligent, well-shot, well-acted and mixes in Kevin Smith's trademark dialog (itself existing in that nebulous region somewhere between high and low art).

That's the point where we reach the first of a long series of jarring tonal shifts.  Down and out, looking for something to talk about during his next podcast, Bryton comes across the darkly charismatic Howard Howe: a crippled man having lived a storied life who was more than willing to talk to the desperate internet journalist.  Their first scene together is likewise excellent: mysterious, ominous and featuring an engaging repartee between the two characters (again, ending up somewhere between crude and refined).

But that is when the movie gives up on trying to put together a cohesive story.  After a string of increasingly awkward encounters, Justin Long is surgically turned into a grotesque-looking approximation of a walrus and the remainder of the film tries to bridge the gap between gross-out gags and body horror.  The rest of the movie's run time (more than an hour in all) is a Frankenstein's monster of comedy-horror: every bit as revolting as the monster Howe creates.

It's jarring, non-sensical and utterly baffling to watch.  I get the joke.  I really do.  But the punchline is such a massive betrayal of the surprisingly excellent first third of the film.  What's even more is that the final third of the film is far too comedic to be taken as seriously as The Human Centipede and far too grotesque to work as a comedy.  It's some kind of disgusting hybrid of the two that is just painful to watch limp along before it finally - mercifully - ends.

Even if Tusk isn't the worst movie that I've seen from 2014, it's damned close.  It is an absolute mess of a film that's not worth anybody's time.  I can't even really recommend this to fans of body horror because it fails so miserably at that aspect of its own narrative and spends so little time developing any sense of ingrained dread.

Rating:  3/10

Worth Buying:  Hell no!

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