The BBFC-esque send-up at the beginning of Fried Barry – with a ‘warning’ of all the adult content to follow and the pointer that film certification is there to help us make informed decisions – suggests from the outset a film stacked with OTT content which is also ready to send itself up. In the case of the former, there’s no argument with the amount of sex and drugs on offer here, though with regards to the latter, it wasn’t always clear to me when or if to laugh at Fried Barry. Furthermore, the tantalising idea of body horror mooted in the premise doesn’t come to pass, or at least not in the ways I was expecting. So it’s scuzzy, yes, but horror is rather low in the mix overall. This is a strange, drug-addled odyssey through rather grotty terrain with some intimation of a ‘bigger picture’ of the human experience, though again, not expressed overtly.
The Barry who gets Fried is a middle-aged man and, even before the big event, he’s not in the best of states: an intravenous drug user, his return home to a distraught wife and child is only of a few moments’ duration before he’s back on the streets again, chasing debts and hitting a local dive bar in his hometown of Cape Town, SA. He heads off from there with a local mate for more of the same; you get the impression that life could be ever thus, but then on his way home late that night, Barry is beamed up by some extraterrestrial force. These aliens experiment on him before swapping him for one of their number, then return ‘him’ right to the place he was picked up. So it’s ‘Barry’ – still wired and still walking around in a state of blank abandon – but it’s also not Barry.
A little like Grant in James Gunn’s Slither (2006), this Barry is new to the world and its inhabitants, seeing for the first time through alien eyes, despite inhabiting a human body. (A later moment in the film also seems a clear allusion to a scene in Slither.) But where Grant’s human frame soon begins to corrupt, Barry seems – for most, if not all intents and purposes – much the same as he was. We begin to get a lot of shots through Barry’s point of view, underlining how incredibly strange all of this seems to him, but bodily? He probably says a little less and dances a lot more, but given the amount of pills he chins as soon as he’s given the opportunity, it’s hard to definitively say he wouldn’t have been like that anyway. And he’s certainly no worse a person than many of the folks he meets on his travels. The Cape Town nightlife scene he blunders into is all grimy streets, dreadful bars and caricatured partygoers (though perhaps this is authentically the case; I’ve never been.) Barry also seems unusually alluring to many of them, perhaps necessarily, given the film’s stated determination to provide numerous sex scenes, but it adds a perplexing plot layer nonetheless. One of these sex scenes sees the film veer for a moment into the kind of Henenlotter territory I’d initially expected, with what seems a clear nod to Bad Biology (2008): some of Barry’s wanderings call to mind the equally scuzzy New York of Basket Case (1982) and the altered states of Brain Damage (1988), but Fried Barry never sticks with that kind of SFX for more than a moment.
Barry’s journey eventually takes him to some incredibly dark, or should we say, even darker places: encounters with Cape Town’s hidden criminal elements bring him up against violence and kidnap, where on some occasions he intervenes – perhaps knowing he is acting for the good, perhaps not. In other situations he does nothing, or just seems to help by accident, showing some evidence of supernatural abilities which is not explored beyond itself. Similarly, his own later incarceration sees him carried along by the forces around him, unable to do a great deal but take any substances proffered. There are large lulls during the middle act of the film where it seems unclear where all of this is going; the inclusion of a fake ‘intermission’ reel, an opportunity to shoehorn in a little more lurid 80s aesthetics it seems, is an unnecessary add-on which doesn’t fit with much around it. I fear this might be one of the problems so often seen when a short film is adapted into a feature – and this is a first feature, too, by director Ryan Kruger. At nearly 100 minutes and with no prepared script and an almost mute protagonist, Fried Barry is a very protracted walk through the streets.
There are some moments of warmth, and underpinning the whole is the question of what extraterrestrial life would learn from a walk on the wild side such as this, even if explication is minimal. Some of the more lurid, retro-weird scenes are fun, and the synth soundtrack works very well with the film. It’s not all bad. It’s just that the head-scratching, or slow, or inexplicable moments outnumber the good here.
Fried Barry (2020) will screen at the Fantasia Film Festival, which starts on 20th August. For more details, click here.