Chris Jordan was clearly too sober to appreciate Charles Band's sixth entry into the Evil Bong franchise.
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| "We really hope you have these - they'll make the next 70 minutes a lot less painful." |
I've written several articles about my
nostalgic love for the early-to-mid-1990s films of Full Moon
Entertainment. In its prime, the studio lead by Charles Band was the
king of straight-to-video horror: cheesy and low-budget, but with a
likable charm, distinct personality, and a very clear ambition to
make movies that were better than the usual video fare. With
impressive (for the budget bracket) production values and awesome
practical effects, not to mention a strong sense that their movies
were made by genuine lovers of horror and sci-fi cinema, Full Moon
could almost always be counted on for a good time, if not always a
good product. What on earth happened to them? I drifted out of touch
with the studio's work by the late-'90s, when their quality was
obviously slipping in the budget-starved years following their split
from Paramount, and just from looking at their more recent DVD covers
I had a sinking feeling that their movies had only gotten worse since
then. Nonetheless, when I was given the opportunity to watch an early
press screener of their new movie, Evil Bong: High-5 (out on blu-ray on June 22nd),
I couldn't resist the chance to get a first look at Charles Band's
latest. Band co-wrote and directed this one himself, so surely it
would at least have some redeeming qualities, I thought. I was wrong.
Evil Bong: High-5 is
horrifically bad, in the most unentertaining way. Granted, it is
clearly a movie intended for viewers who are baked out of their
minds, but even then it underestimates its target audience's
intelligence so much as to be insulting. This is unrecognizable as
the work of the same studio that gave us Subspecies and
Puppet Master III; if
this is reflective of Full Moon's current quality, then the
once-awesome studio has sunk nearly to the levels of modern Troma, to
whom they were once unquestionably superior. This movie is so awful
that I need a medicinal marijuana prescription to dull the pain.
I'm not really in Evil Bong: High-5's
target audience: I haven't smoked weed in years, and I also haven't
seen Evil Bong 1-4, or
the crossover spinoff Gingerdead Man Vs. Evil Bong.
But neither of those things should really matter. A good stoner
comedy will still be funny regardless of your state of mind (case and
point, Super Troopers),
and this movie has such broadly-written, almost development-free
characters that I don't think knowledge of the franchise would be
particularly helpful to give them any more depth. I'm sure this movie
is marginally more entertaining if you're high, but it would still be
absolute garbage. The problem is that the script is so bad that one
of the following two explanations must be true: either Charles Band
himself was completely baked during the entire production process, or
he has such contempt and disregard for the movie's audience that he
just didn't feel the need to put in any effort. There's a scene in
which two painfully cliché stoners stagger through the film acting
like idiots, which makes me suspect that option B is true. It's like
Band is being completely open about thinking his viewers are morons,
but he thinks he can get away with it because they'll be too high to
notice.
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| "Oh no, we're trapped inside a Nintendo 64!" |
The
film consists almost entirely of its flat characters standing around
having structureless conversations in dialogue that sounds like it's
supposed to be a rapid-fire series of one-liners, except almost none
of them are funny. Dialogue like, “I'm higher than Jesus right now!
Achievement unlocked!” and “it's got me feeling like a Kardashian
at a BET party!” It's embarrassing. The scenes tend to drag on in a
directionless way; unfunny skits that don't add to any plot momentum,
or even justify their existence within the film. The plot, such as it
is, involves the nefarious Evil Bong – literally a sentient bong
with an animatronic mouth and a bad attitude – holding a group of
characters (including the Gingerdead Man) hostage in a CGI “bong
world,” and then returning them to the real world to sell
brainwashing weed at a dispensary. Bizarrely, however, the characters
never really deal with the fact that the weed they're selling will
turn its smokers into zombies; it basically just turns into a “how
will we possibly sell all this weed in just a week?” plot, with no
serious attempt to raise the stakes with the Evil Bong's
quickly-forgotten threat of world domination. Meanwhile, the film
attempts to find humor by scraping the bottom of the barrel of
deliberately tasteless gags, out of the assumption that
self-consciously shocking is the same thing as funny. The movie gives
us a series of button-pushing stereotypical characters like The Gook,
The Butt-Pirate, and the sexualized lesbian Poon-ishers, all of whom
are merely cringe-inducing, since – unlike something like South
Park which uses stereotypes to
create very funny social satire with a thought-out message – the
movie is incapable of using them for any purpose, or with anything to
say. It's all just thrown together in the least thought-out way
possible, and ultimately the content is not nearly as offensive as
the total disregard for good writing.
Several
of the characters in this film, including The Gook, The Butt-Pirate,
and The Gingerdead Man, are crossovers from other Full Moon
properties. Bizarrely, the movie is totally up-front about this being
a shameless marketing tie-in. One of the supporting characters is
literally on a quest to sell Full Moon action figures in the film,
and every time he makes his sales pitch, the web site where the toys
can be bought appears on-screen. These are the same figures that you
actually can buy in real-life, at the very web site given. It's
bizarrely meta, though again, Charles Band doesn't do anything clever
with the conceit to make it actually funny; more than anything, it
just lays bare what a lazy cash-grab the movie is. Maybe you can
award it points for honesty?
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| Functional Evil Bong replicas - coming soon to a head shop near you. |
In
addition to its terrible script, it also isn't very well-made. The
Bong-World setting is a very cheap-looking CGI backdrop, and the
actors are superimposed into it using some truly horrendous
green-screen work. The edges of the actors too-often shimmer with the
flaws of bad matte work, and in some cases the green of the
green-screen can still be seen through their hair. Bad CGI
compositing is also to blame for the utterly ridiculous effect of The
Gingerdead Man's mouth; it is so obviously an actor's mouth
superimposed onto a puppet that it conjures up images of Clutch
Cargo. Even in the more
real-world setting of the dispensary there are some bizarre
low-budget flaws, like a shot in which actors leaving the store cast
obvious shadows on the cityscape backdrop just outside the door.
About the best you can say about the film is that some of its
stylized lighting (color accent lights everywhere!) gives some fun
personality to the over-the-top atmosphere, and a couple of the
actors give reasonably entertaining performances. The stand-out is
Sonny Carl Davis, probably best known as the customer in Judge
Reinhold's “I'm going to kick 100% of your ass” scene in Fast
Times at Ridgemont High. Still,
these are very minor positives amid an overwhelming sea of negatives;
just enough to make me think that at least I've seen worse, but not
enough to elevate the film above terrible.
Evil Bong: High-5
is the worst movie I have seen in a long, long time. It is painfully
unfunny, poorly made on nearly every level, and half-assed and
directionless to a staggering degree. Even by the standards of a
strictly watch-it-while-you're-high comedy, it is unacceptable. It is
genuinely difficult to believe that this was made by the same Charles
Band, and the same Full Moon, who just over twenty years ago were
making some of the best stuff on the straight-to-video market. How
the mighty have fallen. Skip it – you won't find a good buzz here.
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan