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| Images courtesy of Anchor Bay Entertainment |
Even before coming within a foot of writer-director-star
Amanda and Michael Drexton’s irascibly insufferable Sour Party, on the
back of the cover box for this Anchor Bay Entertainment release is the bright
picture of The Goonies and The Lost Boys has been turned musical
atrocity Corey Feldman. You know you’re
about to swim deep into some septic-tank waters when you’ve got a new film
trying to pass itself off as worth your time with Feldman in it. Knowing full well it was going to be a chore,
I found myself putting this one off until it was time for the ugly moment of
truth to actually sit down with it.
Intended to be a paean to brat-cultured fringe parasites on the
outskirts of Los Angeles life, the first full-length feature film by the Cruelty
Free and We Can’t Go On directors is a road movie that traps us with
two idiots taking the hardest possible route out of a pretty simple
problem. Supposedly endearing as it goes
on, I kept checking my watch throughout as this pulls out everything from
rancid fart and piss jokes to even poking fun at suicide cults. So much quirky fun to be had here…
Gwen (co-writer Samantha Westervelt) and James (co-director
Amanda Drexton) are two deadbeat thirty-something losers foraging in Los
Angeles through a series of charming yet curious misadventures including
dumbass get-rich quick schemes like uprooting and selling plants to passerby or
even trying to start an OnlyFans dedicated to farting. But when it dawns on Gwen she forgot her
older and estranged sister’s baby shower the night before, she hatches the
hairbrained idea of trying to scheme and/or steal money by any means necessary
to be able to afford one of the registry gifts for her sister. The trouble is older sis doesn’t want her to
go through the trouble of getting her a gift, but Gwen and the movie Sour
Party are dead set on going this route anyway in search of more
misadventures that lead towards something resembling self-discovery or
actualization, but mostly these morons don’t learn shit by the end of this
exhaustive microbudget indie.
With a sight gag no one asked for of Gwen crouching down on
a car seat and pissing in a cup or a pretentious follower of their fart videos
with the ultimate multicolored butt blast lying in wait, poorly-timed swipes at
Enter the Void and more especially Twin Peaks: The Return because
when you know you’re a sore loser you piss on the greats, Sour Party is
the comedy series equivalent of a knife to the ear. Mostly hateful and about nothing, the kind of
black comedy you’d leave around for Gregg Araki to pick up, Sour Party I
guess in the end it’s well shot enough in scope 2.35:1 by Q: Deep Fake cinematographer
Steven Moreno and the score by Me You Madness composer Ezra Reich is
dependably farcical comedy fluff. Performance
wise, Reggie Watts cameos as himself and Samantha Westervelt and Amanda Drexton
do rise to the occasion of being so obnoxious I felt an urge to crack the
blu-ray disc in half after ejecting it from the player.
Maybe you the reader are the one for this movie, but to
think there was a time when Anchor Bay Entertainment was a hallmark of quality
regarding home video DVD or Blu-Ray disc releases. They famously did Sam Raimi’s The Evil
Dead in a deluxe book-of-the-dead release and for awhile had all of the Halloween
films and a chunk of Lucio Fulci’s library.
Now with the rights having gone to other companies years later, instead
they’re picking up and releasing dreck like this. I do wonder if the film may have had a chance
if they just kept Corey Feldman’s involvement a secret. As aforementioned, seeing present day Feldman
on the back of the cover box told me exactly what kind of D- movie lie ahead of
me. Oh well, it has some cute animation
during the opening credits. To each
their own.
--Andrew Kotwicki
