Tusk man the Barbarian

A week ago, I saw Barbarian, a horror film starring Justin Long that has a lot of different tones and things going on. 

Yesterday, my son and I carved our jack o' lanterns for this year, and although he was trying to make a vampire, he said it looked more like a walrus.

These two events in combination could lead me to only one conclusion:

It was time to watch Tusk again.

I'd actually tried to watch Tusk again earlier this month, before I knew Justin Long was in Barbarian and before I knew my son would carve a pumpkin that he thought would look like a large flippered marine mammal. (Not its whole body, just its tusks.) But it wasn't streaming anywhere I could find, not without paying to rent it -- which shouldn't be such a surprise, as I don't think the movie was anything more than a morbid curiosity to most people. 

Me, I love morbid curiosities, and toward the end of this month, I'm not conserving money the way I thought I needed to earlier in the month. (We accepted an offer on our house in Los Angeles, a topic that probably deserves its own post some other time. We're still in escrow but the end now feels in sight.) So when the universe was telling me to rent Tusk from Amazon on Saturday to watch it on my projector that night, I complied.

The first time I wrote about Tusk on this blog, it was in this post, in which I bemoaned that the main thing about Tusk was being spoiled by people saying "Without getting into spoiler territory ..." and then basically just saying the thing. Eight years later, I don't feel the need to still preserve this sort of secrecy about the movie, though I'll still talk around it if possible -- before totally spoiling it with a photo at the end of the post. So this is your SPOILER WARNING for Tusk, even though the poster above, which obviously existed at the time, does a pretty good job previewing the morbid curiosity you are about to witness. (I can talk around Barbarian more easily but there could be mild spoilers for this too.)

So just some context about why I appreciated Tusk as much as I did the first time, which I think was out of sync with people's general thoughts on the film. Kevin Smith's most recent film before this had been Red State, which was my second favorite film of 2011. Especially on the heels of that unexpected pivot toward serious filmmaking, Tusk confirmed for me that Smith might be entering into a whole new period of cinematic exploration.

Alas, it was short lived. His next film, the Tusk spinoff Yoga Hosers, was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and he's followed it with a Jay and Silent Bob movie and a Clerks movie, neither of which I've seen, which could not be more a case of staying in his lane. Given that Smith has always been a fan of distributing by independent channels, one wonders why he couldn't also explore the new weird streak he established in his consecutive collaborations with actor Michael Parks. But it looks like that new Smith has well and truly vanished.

Barbarian, though, put Tusk back in my head. It was in my head more than it might have otherwise been because I edited and posted a review written by other writers later in the week. There are more similarities than you might imagine:

1) Both star Long in a screwed up horror that leaves you no idea where it's going, assuming you have not been exposed to spoilers.

2) In both movies Long plays an entitled douchebag. In fact it could almost be the same character if the character in Tusk made an unlikely comeback from what happens to him.

3) Both characters are going to get what's coming to them. 

4) Both movies are going to take us around in time a bit, and splice together things that would not necessarily seem related to one another. 

5) Both movies have multiple "oh no that's not right" moments that rely on something gruesome happening that you don't want to watch. (You could probably say this about many horror movies but maybe it particularly applies here. Part of the advertising campaign for Barbarian has shown stills of people recoiling from what they're seeing on screen.)

Anyway.

For me, Barbarian was a little overhyped. I definitely enjoyed it, but there are so many thematic issues going on that I felt like I failed to see the big picture, and I had questions about some loose threads that left me wanting more of an explanation -- not because they didn't provide answers that we deserved, but because certain occurrences in the plot, like the mix-up that informs the movie's first third, seemed to have little to no ultimate function in the narrative. But yes, the scene that's grossing out that audience in the ad is good, as are all this movie's disparate elements taken individually.

Tusk also has some really disparate elements. Last night reminded me of that strange, tonally jarring scene where Genesis Rodriguez gives a teary direct address to the camera about her boyfriend cheating on her. Where did this come from? I have no idea, but it renewed my sense of how alive Smith's cinematic engagement feels in this film.

And then there's just everything related to what happens to poor Mr. Long. I've talked around it but you certainly know by now.

So now it's time to include that photo of my son's walrus jack o' lantern, which was getting its trial run in our garage last night next to the one I made, along with the "real" walrus in the film: