By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Aaron Prager, Austin Judd and Robert Dunne
Written and directed by Sean Haitz
Cineverse/Scream Team Releasing/Screambox
Essentially, everything you need to know about CANNIBAL COMEDIAN was already laid out by writer/director Sean Haitz (BIG TOP EVIL) in a short interview with RUE MORGUE back in February, in which he described the film as “a love letter to my favorite horror classics like TEXAS CHAIN SAW and comedies such as ACE VENTURA.”
Well, much like Elvis Costello, Haitz’s aim is true: You really could not offer up two better touchstones for this darkly zany horror film than THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 channeled through Jim Carrey absurdism. Or maybe triangulate a direct-to-video genre spoof of THE KING OF COMEDY, a less bleak, hammier HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and Steve Buscemi’s bullied serial killer Danny McGrath in Adam Sandler’s BILLY MADISON.
Providing a synopsis for CANNIBAL COMEDIAN feels about as necessary as writing one for HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN–it ain’t a bittersweet coming-of-age love story set in Newfoundland, you know? It’s a film about a cannibal comedian.
The flesheating funny guy in question, Charlie (Aaron Prager), lives out in the desert and makes what seems to be a better living than you’d expect butchering hitchhikers for consumption of a bunch of local eccentrics who are very much in on a gag…that would very much make the rest of us gag. The Sawyer family vibes are both enhanced and given a subtextual wink by the fact that the film features Allen Danziger and Edwin Neal, who portrayed Jerry and the hitchhiker in the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, respectively.
Don’t get it twisted: Charlie loves his work. He’s good at it. But he nevertheless dreams of more. He dreams of stage lights and screams of laughter rather of terror. And when he pulls a blood-drenched flyer for an open mic out of a victim’s pocket–and receives some reluctant encouragement from Chrystal (Austin Judd), a young woman he has chained up in his trailer—he begins a journey that has the potential to liberate him from his psychopathic tendencies…or send him even deeper into the abyss of depravity. Simultaneously, we follow Chrystal’s own attempts to manage Charlie’s demons and moods long enough to avoid becoming another victim en route to fulfilling her own Final Girl aspirations.
Between points A and B, we get a lot of puns and groaners. If genre dad jokes weren’t a thing before, they are now! Indeed, some of the comedic material here feels like the one-liners from the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and LEPRECHAUN films delivered with the restrain of a Bob Newhart or Johnny Carson. The fact that only a fraction of them are laugh-out-loud funny—coupled with Prager’s ability to balance a kind of Everyman charisma with a demented bloodlust–actually elevates the film in a weird (and genuinely positive) way. Which is to say, the relentless unfunny-ness of some of the material is hilarious at the very same time it brings a bit of pathos and danger to the film. Who among us hasn’t wished we could be good at something other than whatever God-gifted talents we possess? And wouldn’t it be even worse if those talents seemed to come from not God, but…well, you know.
CANNIBAL COMEDIAN isn’t for everyone. (Then again, what is?) Honestly, even at under 90 minutes, the concept is stretched a little thin at moments. It’s often hard to buy in on suspension of disbelief. Yet there is something about the movie’s gall and kaleidoscopic nuttiness that keeps you engaged and feeling as if you are in on the very, very sick joke.
