Slackers (2002)

And I had hoped that Freddy Got Fingered would be the death of the gross-out comedy. Apparently not, judging from the torrent of body-fluid-based films we've been seeing lately. This one, the worst-reviewed one of the batch, is the kind of film that convinces you that there is something deeply wrong in Hollywood. How this glorified Troma comedy (and I mean one of their less impressive pickups) got big-studio money behind it is something I will never understand. Possibly a goat and a Polaroid was involved. There's a couple scattered laughs, but any shreds of goodwill are decimated by the film's perverse and unpleasant sense of humor. And in Jason Schwartzmann's Ethan, the filmmakers have invented one for the ages -- a character so hateful, so repulsive, so completely devoid of any redeeming facets that spending five seconds in his company is enough to make you want to tear your eyeballs from their sockets and stuff them in your ears to block out all sound. And, like way too many gross-out comedies these days, this movie also makes the mistake of thinking we need to see these characters treated sincerely, which naturally leads to fuzzy-wuzzy meet-cutes and sad misunderstandings and "I want to be a better man" behavior and general unearned sentiment. It's cheap and vomit-inducing when bad films do this, and especially so in this case, since pretty much everybody in the film is either an idiot or a goddamned liar. Weird and sick, but not in a fascinating Freudian/Dadaist way like Freddy -- just in a lame I'd-like-to-slap-a-few-people way.

Grade: D