BIG HELIUM DOG (1999) – The notorious lost film from Kevin Smith’s View Askew, finally unleashed on blu-ray

 

All Images Courtesy MVD Visual/Smodcastle Cinema

In the late-90s, as he reached the peak of his pop-cultural significance as one of the foremost voices of gen-X indie cinema, Kevin Smith had quite the cottage industry going with his New Jersey based indie production company View Askew Productions. With a modest budget from Miramax to develop independent projects, Smith produced a handful of DIY features directed by the various eccentric artists from the View Askew family: Malcolm Ingram’s Drawing Flies (1996), Vincent Pereira’s A Better Place (1997), Bryan Johnson’s Vulgar (2000), and Brian Lynch’s Big Helium Dog (1999). If you frequented video stores in the 90s or early 2000s, those first three films may sound familiar, as they all got pretty decent distribution on DVD – but you could be forgiven for asking yourself “wait, what the hell is Big Helium Dog?”

 

Big Helium Dog is – or had been until this past week – a piece of genuine lost media. A film that, outside of a couple screenings in 1999, has never been legally available. After it was completed, Miramax passed on distributing the film, and it never found distribution elsewhere, instead simply vanishing into the ether.  Since Kevin Smith and View Askew have always had a pretty fanatical fanbase, fans have long known about the existence of Big Helium Dog, and it has always been notorious within those circles as The Lost View Askew Film. The trailer for the movie, along with an extra titled “Whatever Happened to Big Helium Dog,” appeared as Easter eggs on the 2001 DVD of A Better Place, officially documenting its existence, and the film itself eventually slipped out into the world as a bootleg of truly horrendous quality. But aside from that, Big Helium Dog seemed to have completely vanished, doomed to existence in the purgatory of lost media. That is, until Smith’s Smodcastle Cinema blu-ray label surprised everyone (everyone in the small niche of people who actually know what the hell this movie is, anyway) by announcing the home media debut of the film, only 26 years late.

THE FILM:

So, was Big Helium Dog worth the wait? Maybe. It’s definitely no long-lost comedy classic, nor is it even particularly all that good. It is a messy, juvenile, and thoroughly homegrown DIY feature that unquestionably feels put together by a bunch of young comedians in the 90s with limited resources, limited filmmaking skills, and just a desire to make something funny. And while it may not be a particularly good film, that quality is exactly what makes it nonetheless interesting to watch and somewhat endearing, provided you are interested in seeing these comedians towards the starts of their careers, in a rough-around-the-edges early project. If you’re familiar with Big Helium Dog and its lore as a lost film (and certainly if you’ve ever watched the bootleg that went around, in what looked like 240p-at-best RealPlayer quality), it’s a pretty wild experience to actually be able to watch it on blu-ray, looking its best after all these years, and that novelty goes a long way. And at least a few times, the movie manages to pull off some genuinely very funny scenes, even if just as many or more jokes don’t land.

The main reason to watch this film is if you are a fan of any of the people involved. Big Helium Dog was written and directed by Brian Lynch, who would go on to be a successful writer in film (the Minions and Secret Life of Pets movies) and comics (Angel: After the Fall and Spike: After The Fall, Bill & Ted's Most Triumphant Return). And probably thanks to its status as a View Askew production, it has an impressively stacked cast for a microbudget feature. Kevin Smith has a recurring role in the film, as the movie’s own director, Michael Ian Black serves as the film’s narrator/host of sorts, and the movie features most of the guys from Broken Lizard, most prominently Kevin Heffernan and Erik Stolhanske. It also has quite a few cameos, including Mighty Mighty Bosstones frontman Dicky Barrett of all people. Even if the results aren’t great, as someone who came of age loving 90s pop culture, the film being a crossover between members of the View Askewniverse, The State, and Broken Lizard makes it somewhat impossible to ignore, especially in its lost-film context.

 

Big Helium Dog is basically a string of sketch comedy moments. It has very little plot to speak of – it basically just follows a hapless, directionless loser (Matt Kawczynski) as he drifts through life, destroying most of what he touches, getting caught up in increasingly absurd situations, and eventually ending up in league with Satan himself (Kevin Heffernan). The movie also constantly breaks the fourth wall, going outside of itself, as a film producer (Michael Ian Black) critiques the film while it’s in progress, and gives us behind-the-scenes vignettes and interviews with the director (Kevin Smith). In Family Guy style, Big Helium Dog also constantly goes down tangents to cutaway gags, which can lead to some funny moments, but can also cause it to feel very scattered and all over the place.

As one might imagine from a movie based largely around sketch comedy bits and cutaway gags, some bits work way better than others, and the result is a very uneven film. Also contributing to the unevenness is that Brian Lynch was, per the blu-ray extras, 19 when he first wrote it,  and that definitely tracks with how juvenile some of the humor is. The movie has some moments that are very funny, some moments that are willfully very stupid, and some moments that are in gleefully poor taste just for the sake of poor taste (literally a series of cutaway gags that start with “Offensive Joke Number whatever”). Mileage will definitely vary on a lot on the humor, and how funny you find it might depend on your ability to get back into the mindset of a 19-year-old in 1999. I suspect that if the film had actually been distributed in 1999, and I could have seen it as a teenager in the glory days of the View Askewniverse, I would have enjoyed it much more, although even then I probably would have found a lot of it subpar. However, there were still some choice moments that I laughed quite hard at now.

 

And the movie has at least one bit, around the midpoint, which is absolutely great, and had me genuinely laughing my ass off. It’s an extended sequence where the film turns into a gleefully on-the-nose parody of early-90s gen-X indie films – including a few digs at Clerks itself – and it is the best kind of clever but broad comedy. The calling out of all the common tropes of 90s indies, and reducing them to their most bluntly tropey forms, is absolutely hilarious. That sequence alone makes the film worth watching. In general I think Big Helium Dog gets quite a bit better after the midway point, as it finds some kind of less-aimless trajectory – and after the guys from Broken Lizard show up.

 

All in all, Big Helium Dog is a thoroughly okay film, for which mileage will definitely vary. As a comedy, it has a few good bits, and that one absolutely hilarious bit, but in general is not all that good. But if you’re curious to see this group of comedians in a fairly early project that is a truly homegrown indie, it may be worth a look, and if you’re a View Askew fan who has long been familiar with the lore of this as a lost film, then you are definitely in the ideal audience to check this out.

 

THE BLU-RAY

 

Big Helium Dog comes to us on the MVD Visual imprint Smodcastle Cinema, in a brand-new HD restoration of the original negative. For what the movie is, it looks very good, while also retaining a slightly rough DIY look that is very fitting for the film. Detail is as sharp as possible, and the transfer has a very filmic look, with a natural grain structure that shows very crisply. Colors, contrast, and saturation all look excellent. It is a very good technical presentation of the source. However the film itself appears to have been shot on 16mm, and is a naturally soft-looking feature, which also got a low-budget post-production process which causes the film to look substantially softer any time titles or visual effects are on-screen. This is a film that is never going to look that good – it clearly is a product of the era where the format it was being chiefly made for was VHS – but it looks as good as it possibly can, and if you’ve previously watched the long-circulated bootleg, this transfer is a massive, massive upgrade.

The film does have quite a bit of scratches on it, which have not been restored away, but honestly I didn’t mind this at all, and actually thought it felt pretty appropriate for the film. Realistically they are there simply because there was not a restoration budget to meticulously remove every scratch from Big Helium Dog digitally. But in practice, the slightly distressed look definitely feels right for such a lo-fi, homegrown 90s oddity which prior to this disc was lost media.

 

As one might expect from the cult-favorite View Askew crew, the extras are very plentiful. They begin with an optional introduction to the film by Kevin Smith and Brian Lynch, from the re-premiere of the film at the Smodcastle Cinema theater,  following its rescue from lost-media status – and I highly recommend watching it before beginning the movie. It absolutely puts the film in context, and will increase your enjoyment or at least appreciation of it. From that same Smodcastle Cinema screening, the disc also includes the 72-minute Q&A which followed the film, featuring Lynch and several of the film’s cast and crew members. The disc also has no less than two audio commentaries – both featuring Lynch and the film’s star Matt Kawczynski. Rounding out the disc are some vintage audition tapes and press materials. View Askewniverse fans will definitely find that this disc scratches their itch for behind-the-scenes goodness.

 

 

Big Helium Dog, and Smodcastle Cinema’s blu-ray of it, won’t be for everyone. This is a movie with decidedly niche appeal, largely limited to the cult of View Askew/Kevin Smith fans who will be inherently excited about it as a lost-film oddity. That said, it definitely has its moments, and I did have fun with it. If you’re excited about this film finally seeing the light of day though, this blu-ray is an excellent presentation of it, and fans should be absolutely thrilled with it.

- Christopher S. Jordan

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