Slackers
dir. Dewey Nicks
Screen Gems
Our adolescent desires led to the distasteful disaster that is
Slackers. We wished for a line of movies that would scramble our
overworked mind. We prayed for 90-minute visions filled with young,
toned bodies and cartoonish antics. At the multiplex, we elected to pass on
other films that dabbled in tragedy, satire, mature love and loss. We
wanted to be 10 years old again.
So the wizards in Hollywood retooled and updated a lustful and ludicrous
genre that began, in the late '70s and early '80sm with Animal House
and Porky's. They found glossier faces to star in the pictures this time
around. They made the sexual frustration more explicit. They stretched
juvenile situations until they were infantile. Older critics decried the return
to teen gross-out flicks. But you and I — we laughed it up.
Once the seed was sown, there was no stopping the offspring: American
Pie
begot Cruel Intentions; Intentions begot Road Trip;
Road Trip begot Dude, Where's My Car?; Dude
begot American Pie 2; Pie 2 begot Freddie Got Fingered; Fingered begot
Slackers.
The genre's been headed downhill from the start.
Low-brow humor doesn't evolve, it deteriorates. This latest scion of
the ruined shock-flick genre should mark the end of the line for us.
Slackers pits an obsessive, psycho nerd named Ethan (Jason Schwartzman)
against a crew of collegiate cheaters. Ethan blackmails the scammers into landing him a date with
his dream girl; the tricksters aim to undo Ethan. The plot is loopy, dopey
and tiresome, and the comic asides don't elicit the smallest of smiles.
The movie is DOA.
Slackers goes for the gutter and misses. Its random rock 'n' roll sex
fantasy sequences are lame and obnoxious. A man in Speedos and a young
woman with a vibrator are no longer uproariously shocking, they're
yawns. A 71-year-old Mamie Van Doren exposing her chest for a sponge bath is
morbidly repulsive.
In essence, Slackers lacks anything else to offer besides its failed,
over-the-top attempts at humor. A good gross-out film will, in fact,
be a cohesive movie with a handful of outrageous scene-stealers. Slackers
is a hodgepodge of tasteless episodes all clamoring for more attention than
they are worth. Sight gags follow crude comments, which step on the heels
of inappropriate sexual encounters. There's no genuine love story, hero,
conflict or laugh in Slackers.
But you do realize that Slackers will spawn more movies in its
likeness if it is successful? That's why we must hold strong and abandon this line of films no matter
what comes next. Just as the genuinely frightening Halloween sparked a
genre that took a steep downward spiraled and became Nightmare on Elm Street 5,
the teenage-gross-out genre is in the final throes of its life cycle.
We do not have to watch as it takes its last gasp.
— Rasheed Newson (rasheednewson@hotmail.com)
