Tusk (2014)
Directed by Kevin Smith
When his best friend and podcast co-host goes missing in the backwoods of Canada, a young guy joins forces with his friend's girlfriend to search for him.
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5 films that influenced Tusk
What critics say influenced Tusk
Once Howard’s plan becomes clear, Smith reveals a debt to Tod Browning’s 1932 masterpiece “Freaks,” the 1973 mad-herpetologist movie “Sssssss” and the recent “The Human Centipede,” among other predecessors.
Until it slips back into horror again, and an ending that plays a little like "Freaks."
Horror movies love the distortion and recombination of body parts, as in Frankenstein, Freaks and The Fly (to name just some F titles).
The denouement might just bring Tod Browning’s “Freaks” to mind.
On his way out of the theater, one critic compared it, not unfavorably, to Tod Browning’s masterpiece “ Freaks .”
His latest assignment has taken him to the backblocks of rural Canada in search of a kid who accidentally lost a leg while re-enacting a scene from Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.
We first see them helpless with laughter over a found video along the lines of the “Star Wars kid,” but this one is a “Kill Bill” wannabe who accidentally slices off his own leg at the thigh.
Trekking up to Winnipeg to interview a kid who sliced off his leg in homage to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, Wallace finds that the boy has died of his wound.
He travels to Winnipeg to interview a young man dubbed the Kill Bill Kid (à la the real-life Star Wars Kid), whose video of himself wielding a samurai sword and accidentally slicing off one of his legs has gone viral.
They’re obsessed with a homemade video one of their listeners has sent in: While re-enacting a scene from one of the Kill Bill movies, a hapless Canadian kid lops his leg off with a sword.
Some have compared the general plot conceit as a variation on 2010's " The Human Centipede (First Sequence) ," but to dismissively describe "Tusk" in this way is to not understand how much brave, gleeful strangeness and striking sense of character and vision have been brought to this deviously lurid, satirically cutting production.
Science wants to create the perfect man, the ideal mate; that was the goal of surgeon Antonio Banderas in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In , and it was as doomed to grotesque failure, to a mockery of noble intentions, as any story about a man who would play God.
After an “accident” that turns our “hero” into an amputee, Howard reveals a kind of Walrus fetish that leads to some experimentation that’s rivals The Human Centipede and Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In on the freak show scale.
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Look, it’s nice that Johnny Depp decided to make a cameo in a movie which he wasn’t in just for the paycheck – I’m looking at you, The Tourist (2010), The Lone Ranger (2013), and all those damned Pirates of the Caribbean sequels – but you would hardly guess he was taking the role seriously given the performance he gives in Tusk is so far over-the-top he circumnavigates.