By Keri O’Shea
By sheer coincidence, two of the films which I most enjoyed at this year’s Dead By Dawn festival are all about the subject of friendship, and how that friendship endures under, shall we say, a series of unfortunate events. The first of these is of course The Battery, which uses a zombie outbreak to frame its narrative and to drive hell into its two protagonists, with impressive results. There’s nothing so monstrous driving the action in the second buddy-movie-with-a-twist Mon Ami, however; what we have in this instance is the engine of pure human stupidity. We see the machinations of two best friends – Cal (Scott Wallis) and Teddy (Mike Kovac) seeking to improve their lot – and failing, in spectacular, bloody, blackly comedic style. The twist in this buddy movie is pure horror movie, and this comedy of errors wrings its laughs out of some pretty bleak subject matter; I was surprised at just what director Rob Grant was capable of rendering funny at several points during this film and I think this, in and of itself, is something to be applauded.
Mon Ami takes for its central premise the incontestable fact that although humanity is capable of the odd flourish, the odd game-changing spark of innovation, more often than not people’s great ideas are deeply fucking stupid. Cal and Teddy, lifelong friends who work a humdrum job selling hardware at the local store, are probably not best-placed to think up revolutionary ways to improve their lives tenfold, but it doesn’t stop them from having a go anyway, and therein lies their first mistake. To be fair, when not being ground into the dirt at work, Cal has very little else going for him, while his pal Teddy spends his down time being hen-pecked by his wife Liz, who keeps up her constant barrage of checking-up on him via mobile phone (and only appears in the movie during the final act, but boy, does she make up for lost time!) Still, all of Liz’s surveillance has missed its target, as it has failed to stop Cal and Teddy dreaming up the following: if they can kidnap Crystal, their boss’s lovely daughter and also their co-worker, then they can hold her to ransom. Their boss adores his daughter – of course he’ll be all too keen to pay up – and they won’t do anything to hurt her. Why has no one thought of this before? Hallelujah! They get everything ready – they know where to get her, where to keep her, and how to get their cash. They even invest in some masks. They’re good to go.
It essentially all goes wrong from that point where the abstract ‘What if we could?’ turns into a ‘What do we do now?’ – and not in the ways you might be expecting. The farce here is overblown, frequently grisly, and paced absolutely perfectly; Grant does such a good job of layering joke onto joke that, even allowing for the fact that I may have been slightly stir-crazy by this point in the festival thanks to a liquid diet/little sleep/even less daylight, I was helpless with laughter throughout. The barrage is made so effective by the genuine-seeming cluelessness of our lead guys as bad goes to worse. Cal and Teddy are completely unbelievable master-criminals and therefore brilliant as they gape, panic and bicker about their burgeoning situation, just as your average idiot would. And guess what? They’re not the only idiots at work here. As the story progresses they encounter adversaries who are just as dumb as they are. Just the right number of acts form the bedrock of this film; it knows when to move from the sublime to the ridiculous but equally, it knows when to stop.
One of my absolute bug-bears in modern horror movie-making is the over-reliance on torture porn tropes; these have established themselves rapidly and recognisably, they’ve spread like a virus through low-budget, low-brow filmmaking and boy, are they boring. All of that being said, torture tropes now have the potential to serve as a useful benchmark. Essentially, if I can watch a film which features someone being tied to a chair and I still enjoy it, then we have something rather rare to behold. Not only does Mon Ami fit this bill, but it does another thing: it derives a lot of its humour from playing with these tropes. So much of what goes wrong during Cal and Teddy’s escapades relates in some way to using the wrong hardware, shoddy appliances or the untimely arrivals of neighbours. Rather than depicting a regular domestic space which has been turned into a place of inescapable cruelty, Mon Ami has a regular domestic space which just can’t function properly as the den of iniquity Cal and Teddy need it to be, even if just for the short term. It doesn’t work, and if anything they come off worse for even daring to try. We come close to torture porn slapstick at times here – if you can forgive me for using that expression – and it’s absolutely hilarious.
Masses of action, just the right ratio of humorous to gory moments and no significant plot lines left dangling, Mon Ami is a pleasure. It’s a black comedy where one stupid decision is allowed to blossom into a catalogue of chaos, and as a crowd-pleaser it’s difficult to imagine a better movie. Again, here’s a film which will no doubt make it into my top 10 films of this year. Now, no one go getting any stupid ideas…