FATHER’S DAY **** USA / Canada 2011 99 mins
Framed as a late night cable TV movie, complete with video-quality trails for fake movies, this follows the exploits of a vengeful, one-eyed “Ahab” who, having seen his dad raped and killed as a child, slaughtered the culprit and wound up in jail. The same kind of Daddy-Raping/Murdering crimes are still happening, so he teams up with a teenage rent boy, a young priest and his own hot, younger sister (Amy Groening, niece of the SIMPSONS creator, trivia fans!) to track him down. The faux-Grindhouse tics (scratched up film stock, et al) are now old hat but this Troma movie is unusually imaginative and exuberant. Groening, who gets naked and is probably the most beautiful girl to ever grace a Troma film, is just one reason to tune in to a film that’s confident of its gross-out gags and delivers a barrage of very well done extreme gore: check out the penis eating and a naked woman shoved face first on to a live chainsaw. Any movie that has the gall to quote UN CHIEN ANDALOU for a razor-eye slicing within a montage set to “Adagio For Strings” deserves some kudos, but this one also showcases deliberately extended incestuous sex, a generous serving of both exposed cocks and bare boobs and close-up bell-end slashing. Often inventive in its more demented tangents (especially the visions of the mortally wounded Ahab’s “Hell”), it has the inevitable Lloyd Kaufman cameo as God: “I own upstairs and downstairs”. And movie quote of the year just might be: “My fucking keys are in that!”
Review by Steven West