Last night I watched another cinematic gem from my distant relative (probably) Steven King. This one was a little more recent but no less camptacular. My copy of the movie had messed-up sound, but I was so engrossed that I watched the entire thing, even though the dialogue was tracked to proceed the images by about a second. This lent itself to an bonus level of surprise (“What was that sound? Oh, I guess it was a car crash”). Besides, my quality standards for horror movies are appallingly low. One lonely night several years ago when my HBO On Demand was glitching I watched the entirety of “Friday the 13th Part 5,” (arguably the worst one) through digital static that would have driven lesser men to epilepsy.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this movie was so awesome. Maybe it was the fat suit that made the protagonist look like Jiminy Glick for half the movie. Maybe it was the way Joe Mantegna showed up 45 minutes in and began killing and maiming gypsies with hydrochloric acid like it was just another day at the office which, considering his career, I guess it was (incidentally, separating Joe Mantegna’s dialogue from his image makes it impossible not to the imagine all of his lines being delivered by Fat Tony from “The Simpsons”). Or perhaps it was the way the movie ended with a quadruple homecide performed by a strawberry pie.
The flick tells the whimsical tale of a currupt Jiminy Glick who accidentally kills a gypsy woman while getting road head from his wife. He receives his comeuppance in the form of a Jenny Craig rapid weight loss curse from the woman’s crazy old gypsy father (pictured here cursing someone else for calling shotgun before him). Steven King does another of his trademark cameos as the lone witness to the accident. I still prefer him to Stan Lee, but in his latter movies his characters start to seem borderline retarded. I don’t know if this is a deliberate comment on the New England folk he so frequently chronicles, but having seen his work in “Creepshow” it feels like he’s phoning it in.
Anyway, our hero gets increasingly freaked out as he starts dropping pounds like Al Roker and his wife decides to switch it up and give road head to his doctor instead, breaking one of the binding laws of marriage: love me, love my gypsy curse. He proceeds to declare war on the old man, enlisting the help of Joe Mantegna the gypsy slaying badass. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but the long and the short of it is he stomps the gypsy only to be taken out by the pie.
This could be a morality tale about justice and responsibility. It could be a scathing look at society’s obsession with keeping fit. It’s not though. It is however an exciting gypsy revenge tale with lots of fat suits and acid burns that served to successfully blot out the horrible monotonous memories of my day, allowing me to escape into dreams of strawberry pie and road head.
I recommend the deluxe edition with shitty sound. Use the dialogue to predict the actor’s choices before you see them, then watch them disappoint you every time. Fun for the whole family!
Writer/Producer