For months, Bong of the Dead (2011) has been at the top of
my “recommended for Katie” list on Netflix. What does this say about me?
In all honesty, I love horror comedy. I mean, everyone loves
the Evil Dead series, but I would even lump two of my all-time favorite films—Beetlejuice
and Monster Squad—into this category. I like
stoner comedy: Cheech & Chong were childhood staples; Half Baked was a
college staple. My band even once recorded the theme song for a Comedy Central
pilot called “Stoners with a Time Machine”—all twelve seconds of it, and you can find it here.
So truthfully, by all accounts Netflix had it right. The straight-to-video classic Bong of the Dead
was my destiny.
(Also, the tagline “There will be bud” is good. I admit it, it is.)
The film opens with a ten minute sequence depicting a meteor
falling to earth, I think, and then this old guy puts his hand into the crater,
I guess, and pulls out some gelatinous muck that causes him to become a zombie,
it would seem. He eats his wife and then she becomes a zombie and they eat each
other. There is no dialogue in this sequence, only grunts.
I turned to Rob and asked, “What the hell are we watching?”
“I think it’s a Soundgarden* video.”
“Oh.”
“I think it’s a Soundgarden* video.”
“Oh.”
Cue the opening credits, and then we are introduced to our
two stoner protagonists. I did not catch either of their names, just that one
of them is wearing a “Team Weed” shirt. Then they started talking. Listen, I get it. Stoned people stereotypically speak a
certain way. There is a way to do this well—Rory Cochrane as Slater in Dazed
& Confused, Jason Segel in basically every episode of “Freaks & Geeks”, and so
on.
Then there are these guys.
No. Just…just no. I didn’t even make it through their
introductory scene that consisted of waving around a glass jar filled with a
substance that looked like slime from “You Can’t Do That on Television” that had…something
to do with the zombies? I think it was maybe a mashup of...their brains? I couldn’t even tell you. I was out.
The Netflix time counter says we made it through 15 minutes.
It felt like a goddamn hour. I guess there will not be bud.
*I know that this is the second reference to Soundgarden in under
a month and I seriously don’t even care.
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