Giving young actors a budget of a couple of million dollars and telling them to go make a movie is a lot like giving a four-year-old a pair of scissors and telling them to practice those naiscent running skills…the results are not gonna be pretty. Allowing some actors a budget to make the political equivalent of potty jokes (in one case, quite litterally) is just completely irresponsible.
David “I married Courtney Cox so you don’t have to” Arquette and his ex-Friends wife have created a little opus they call “The Tripper.” It’s a fun-loving story about some Really Earnest Hippies who encounter a derranged psychopath who likes to dress up like President Ronald Reagan, mimic his voice, use his one-liners…and chop people to death with an axe. Um…yeah.
Watching some bad movies, you think, “Wow…this musta seemed funny on paper…I wonder what happened.” Not this turkey. What I wonder is what movie exec lost his job for greenlighting this abomination.
Don’t get me wrong. I love satire. I love comedy. I love political humor, even when it’s my guy on the sharp end of the stick. But this…this is just crap – and not even good crap, at that.
Fortunately, I missed this one in the movie theatre. (So did virtually everybody else. I think their box office was a whopping $20,840, and it looks like it opened – and closed – in the same weekend. Off to cableland, where even a bad movie can live forever in the 2 AM time slot…
The description on Dish Network read, “A serial killer with a Ronald Reagan obsession has an ax to grind with a group of friends who arrive to attend a weekend conert in the forrest.” Um…not exactly. What the blurb fails to point out is our serial killer dresses up and sounds just like Ronald Reagan and murders people indiscriminately. Hilarity ensues. Not. This is one unfunny horror film. It’s also not at all scary or suspenseful, so I have no idea what Arquette was going for. Unless, of course, it was to be like some really naughty child, using every bad word and rude gesture he can to shock and dismay his parents.
I found this movie offensive on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. Hmm. Let’s start with the director himself. Quoted on ImDb.com, Arquette said that, despite political elements, his intention was never to further an agenda but to just make a “fun” movie. Sure, Dave. And I suppose you never considered your brand of humor might just make half the country think you’ve got a political axe to grind, huh?
What would be REALLY different is if you had a card-carrying liberal do something like this, but instead of a conservative icon, make your derranged serial killer have a JFK fixation (yeah…and he could dress up all his victims like Jackie and Marilyn!) or maybe Bubba (oooh…he could sexually assault his victims first!). Hmm. Not funny? Yeah, I know. Neither is making Reagan out to be a homicidal sociopath.
I’d love to say this kind of thing is the exception that proves the rule, but it’s not. Most of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood right now is either derrisively dismissive, openly hostile, or rabidly reactionary to the conservative point of view. It’s no longer if they have a liberal agenda anymore – it’s more a matter of how well they’ve chosent to hide it – if at all.
I might have been able to excuse a movie that mercilessly skewered Reagan, if they’d done something funny, or even a little interesting. As it is, I’m just gonna have to erase it from my DVR’s hard drive, and hope that I can find a way to de-louse those sectors on the platters.
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