By Ben Bussey and Keri O’Shea
After seeing Kevin Smith’s Tusk at Abertoir Horror Festival 2014, your illustrious editors reflect on the experience. In case you haven’t heard about it, in a nutshell it’s about sleazy podcaster Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) who goes to interview wacky old seafarer Howard Howe (Michael Parks) about his life – but it turns out Howe is completely insane, and intends to turn Wallace into the best friend he ever had: a walrus with which he was once lost at sea. We suspected this one would leave us with plenty to talk about, and indeed it did. There will be spoilers, but you’ll be warned before the worst of them…
Ben: Okay – so I don’t know where the first UK public screening of Kevin Smith’s new film Tusk took place, but the second was on a Saturday afternoon in front of a bunch of mostly hungover people in Aberystwyth. And we were there.
Keri: A challenging one for the hungover audience. I mean, tonally the film is so odd…comedic; nasty; body horror too? Unlike anything else I’ve seen Kevin Smith deliver.
Ben: Absolutely. There is a great deal of it that’s immediately recognisable as Kevin Smith, certainly more than was the case with Red State – but then there’s all that other stuff. How well versed in Kevin Smith are you, by the way? I’ve pretty much been following him since I saw Mallrats back in the 90s; seen everything he’s done except Cop Out. Rather went off him in recent years, so his sudden shift toward horror was kind of a pleasant surprise.
Keri: Well, I idolised his early stuff – Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma…though I confess I kind of dropped away as an avid viewer, so I haven’t seen Red State. Haven’t seen any of his stuff in a while, which probably made the shock of Tusk a lot greater. The very well-handled naturalistic dialogue is still there in Tusk, for sure, and the laughs come from that but – well, nothing else felt like a Smith movie.
Yikes, he made Jay and Silent Bob Get Old: Tea Bagging in the UK? So Tusk not his first foray into body horror, then?
Ben: Haven’t seen that; I assume it’s a live video of their UK tour from a year or two ago, around the same time he was decrying all film criticism as meaningless because he was tired of getting bad reviews. It’s very refreshing to see that, after acting like a petulant child online, he’s channeled that disaffection the right way: by actually getting outside of his usual parameters and taking a stab at something different.
Like I said, Red State was an even more drastic change – I definitely recommend seeing it, although it isn’t a complete success. And of course one of the key things about Red State in relation to Tusk: it was the first time Smith and Michael Parks worked together.
Keri: Ah. And he did stellar work as a psychopath in Tusk.
Ben: But in the interests of starting at the beginning, I suppose we should first acknowledge the real lead – Justin Long’s mindbogglingly obnoxious comedy podcaster Wallace, presumably so named because it sounds a bit like Walrus.
Keri: Possibly – I hadn’t thought of that. Though his character made me wonder – what are the limits on sympathy? A guy gets picked up by a maniac, but then he’s in that neck of the woods to spitefully exploit a kid on his podcast. I did pity Wallace – maybe in a sort of magnifying-glass-insect way – but he certainly wasn’t pitched as a hero, and I think that made the way the film unfolded a hell of a lot more interesting…
Ben: Definitely, yeah. As much as the whole ‘man gets turned into a walrus’ premise was settled on primarily because of its bizarro appeal, it was also utilised in a fairly intelligent way; Wallace is paying for his own inhumanity by literally being robbed of his humanity. Smith being very catholic again, I suppose.
Keri: I guess – although, we can say that the other man-walruses may well not have had his flaws (mild spoiler there: it transpires Wallace isn’t the first person Howard has done this to), and for all the laughs, we had a pretty fucking brutal story of a mentally ill former abuse victim visiting the sins of the fathers (or indeed the Fathers) on people who had no part in it.
Ben: Oh yeah, I’d almost forgotten about his whole orphanage abuse backstory. Certainly Howard Howe is by far the more sympathetic of the two in almost every respect; it’s just the little detail of him being an extremely dangerous lunatic.
Keri: Again, that whole ‘where does sympathy begin and end’ question, I guess…
Ben: He was a nice man really; could he help it if he liked to mutilate people to make them resemble walruses?
Keri: I’m sure he could, yes! This is where the decision to add humour was, I think, a real saving grace.
Ben: Well yeah. You couldn’t possibly play something so out there completely straight. But it was also surprising just how much of it WAS played straight, even in the most out-there moments. It’s that rare thing in horror comedy, when you’re not entirely sure whether to laugh or be freaked out, and you end up feeling a mix of both – which, in a way, only makes it more disturbing.
Keri: Like the ring tone…cutting through scenes of pretty full-on peril with something utterly daft and a real earworm!
Ben: Oh god yes. Much as was the case with American Mary two years ago, I’ve been unable to get that damned ringtone out of my head. It felt like a character in its own right.
Keri: Well in AM’s case that was a standard-issue ringtone, so I heard it everywhere! Less likely with Tusk…though I might get it.
Ben: Smith is a marketing master, so I’m sure you’ll be able to pick out a Tusk fan in a crowd no problem – they’ll have that ringtone and they’ll be wearing one of those ‘Red & White but never Blue’ T-shirts.
Keri: Shall we talk about the mysterious cameo..?
Ben: Yeah, I’m happy to talk about the cameo – it’s not exactly a secret, and we generally go at least partially into spoilers when we do these things (although I guess in this case it’s a film far less people will have had the chance to see yet.)
Keri: Well, we shall give due warning…
ALRIGHT READERS, YOU SAW IT – YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. TUSK CASTING SPOILER COMING UP…
…I was just still thinking about the comedic aspect, and wondering how you found (‘ulp) Depp?
Ben: I really didn’t like Johnny Depp in this at all. But the thing is, I know that this has less to do with the role or his performance than it is to do with my overarching wish that he would stop having to be so bloody eccentric all the time and get back to being a proper actor. That said – do you know who the first person to be offered the role was?
Keri: I’m pretty much with you on Depp, though I admire the way he gets away with this sort of thing all the time now. Who was it?
Ben: Quentin Tarantino.
Keri: ….Not sure if I think that would have been good or not!
Ben: Know what you mean! I’m fairly sure it would have been worse. I guess Depp pulls it off better (heheheh) in those rare few moments which require real gravitas – his final scene in particular. Ultimately I just didn’t like that character, as he only served to facilitate that whole best friend & girlfriend subplot which was, well, a bit shit.
Keri: The whole Keystone Cops bit is always over-handled. That said, I had the biggest issue (with a film overall I really enjoyed in its bold fuckedupness) with the ending.
Ben: You and me both. It’s one thing for a film to play around with some weird ideas, but you have keep some semblance of reality… shall we go into specifics or do we want to keep from getting too spoilery?
Keri: I say go for it with bold warning at the start….
ALRIGHT THEN READERS – CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED ONCE AGAIN, WE’RE ABOUT TO SPOIL THE END OF TUSK…
Ben: Okay then – the whole idea of leaving him in walrus form, and letting him live as if he was a walrus; it maybe works as a cruel joke, but it just didn’t feel in any way logical. I never studied psychology, but I’ve certainly heard tell of instances where people who had spent extended periods of time with animals wound up behaving like the animals. But we’re talking years, I think. Wallace – he was in walrus form at best two days, and not in the company of other walruses. (Can’t quite believe I’m talking about this so seriously…)
Keri: Seemed really cruel to have this bizarre ending to me – whereby they save his life, somehow keep him as an animal (a big ask, in a sequence of big asks), then have that epilogue with his girlfriend’s anecdote about crying being ‘what separates us from the animals,’ before we see the ‘animal’ crying himself. I don’t know. The film asks us to take a lot on board, but that seemed too much – too mean and too weird, and yes, I know that sounds ridiculous and as if I can readily accept everything that came before…
Ben: It’s a pretty severe punishment for someone whose worst crime is, well, being a bit of a prick. But it does make the overall morality of the film interesting, particularly given that Wallace was written as a podcaster because that’s what Smith himself primarily does these days. The overall message would seem to be a warning against being cruel to strangers online, which does seem to be a big thing these days.
Keri: And apparently, there’s a whole sequence after the credits which may have added more insult to injury.
Ben: Oh, I hadn’t heard about any post-credits scene. And now I’m in two minds as to whether or not I want to know what happens in it.
Keri: Up to you – just read a savage review of the film via Badass Digest. I’ll leave that to you…
Ben: Right – will take that into consideration.
Keri: Anyway, we should probably wrap this up here or hereabouts…
Ben: Yep, I think we’ve about covered it, and I guess my final thoughts would be that, in spite of the misgivings we share, overall I really enjoyed Tusk. It set out to be a weird, unpredictable horror comedy that lingers in your memory, and it succeeded.
Keri: So – Tusk. Smith has made it clear in recent years that he ‘doesn’t give a fuck’ and Tusk is testament to the fact that he doesn’t – doesn’t care to respect genre conventions, or rest in a genre at all…as such, the film is an odd fish (!) but I think people hammering it as a bad horror film; well, horror film it ain’t, in an straightforward way. Probably missing the point to see it as such.
It has big big issues, but I don’t loathe it. In fact, I was engrossed by it, and I think aside from godawful cameos and over-extending any logic past the point of no return, it was an interesting film. It was kind of like Human Centipede meshed with Portlandia. I think that is my final word!
Ben: Two films I haven’t seen.
Keri: Portlandia is TV.
Ben: Okay, a film and a TV show I haven’t seen. But anyway – the key thing I take from all this is ‘interesting film.’ More than anything else, I’m just happy to see that Kevin Smith is making films that are interesting again – not necessarily great, but interesting. I wasn’t sure we’d see the day again.