Year released: 2011
THE CHARGE: Being the best movie ever directed by something that sounds like George Jetson's robot dog.
THE EVIDENCE: Is there anything more frightening than the holidays? As if putting on a brave face and dealing with your relatives wasn't troublesome enough, numerous film makers have ensured that we need to spend every Halloween, Christmas, New Year's, birthday, Mother's Day and Earth Day looking over our shoulders to make sure that a masked maniac isn't trying to offer us season's greetings with a butcher knife between the shoulder blades. Canadian film crew "Astron-6" has taken their turn on the holiday exploitation bandwagon with Father's Day and it's safe to say that I'll never view that particular day the same way again.
The movie opens with the aftermath of the latest attack by The Father's Day Killer. It's a remarkably gruesome scene, and the killer is still there feeding on the remains of his victim. But his grotesque celebration is short lived when an eyepatched assassin - think Snake Plissken on a bad hair day - arrives to hunt him down and put a bullet between his eyes. Roll opening credits. Ohhhhhh-kay?
It turns out that The Fathers Day Killer doesn't go down so easily. He's actually a demon called The Fuchman who returns every few years to kill, devour and do even worse things to any man who's ever raised a child. Now The Fuchman is back, leading an elderly priest to send his youthful protege Father Sullivan to find Ahab, the eyepatched assassin from the opening scene.
Ahab has been hiding out in the Canadian wilderness, still stinging from his first encounter with The Fuchman which led him to serve some jail time. After some cajoling and a lengthy discussion about maple syrup, Father Sullivan convinces Ahab to take up the fight once again.
Clearly the face of someone who doesn't give a Fuchman.
Sullivan's journey to find Ahab marks a turning point in the film. To this point, the film has been played as a fairly straight, albeit somewhat twisted, horror flick. But then the montage of Sullivan's journey shows him traveling through all sorts of dangerous environments, despite his journey ostensibly being a simple jaunt from the US to Canada. This is when the Astron-6 film crew takes its tongue out of its cheek and jams it down the viewer's throat, revealing that Father's Day is as much a horror film as The Naked Gun is a police procedural. It's a joke, son!
What follows is wall-to-wall madness as Ahab, Sullivan and a young man-whore looking to avenge his father's death all engage in a cat and mouse game to find and kill The Fuchman. Impeding their progress (nothing's ever easy, right?) is a cult of Fuchman worshipers and an overly aggressive police captain who wants the trio to stay out of his way.
And just when it looks like the good guys are winning, Ahab's stripper sister is possessed by the demon, engages in some extremely incestuous action with Ahab, and is subsequently dragged to Hell. The trio have to go there to save her - a journey easier said than done for Father Sullivan - and it all culminates in a bizarre combination of green screen effects and stop motion animation ending with the most darkly comic final scene in movie history. Seriously, I actually cringed at myself for laughing as hard as I did.
The game show Guess That Secretion never got past the pilot stage.
Father's Day is ultimately a vile concoction of murder, sodomy, incest, graphic violence, graphic nudity, graphic everything. And I loved it. I certainly found it a lot funnier than the Robin Williams/Billy Crystal comedy of the same name. But make no mistake, this is seriously twisted comedy for seriously twisted minds. It makes Troma's envelope-pushing comedies like Terror Firmer and Poultrygeist look like Merchant Ivory productions. Those with sensitive constitutions need not apply and should probably seek out the aforementioned Williams/Crystal romp instead.
I loved this movie even before I learned of its budget, which elevated my love to a near God-like awestruck adulation. It turns out that there are ten thousand reasons to admire this movie and each one has a picture of George Washington on it. Yes, Father's Day was made with a $10,000 budget. It's absolutely incredible what the Astron-6 film crew managed to put on screen with a budget that was less than the catering costs for the last Mission: Impossible movie. Hell, even Kevin Smith's critically hailed low budget debut Clerks cost him over $27,000 to make and doesn't look one-tenth as good as Father's Day.
I'm not saying that you'll confuse Astron-6's work with a Spielberg/Lucas production; it's more like the mutant love child of John Waters and Herschell Gordon Lewis, raised with love by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. But the crew deserves serious props for stretching every dollar to create the most reprehensible, most unapologetically disgusting and most hilarious movie I've seen in ages. Kudos!
And yes, I know George Jetson didn't have a robot dog. It's a joke, son!
THE VERDICT: Father's Day is NOT GUILTY of crimes against cinema despite violating every possible rule of good taste, and the judge sincerely hopes that these fine perverted gentlemen continue to entertain us for years to come.
