Toronto Film Festival: Tusk - film review

Kevin Smith's latest, starring Justin Long and Haley Joel Osment, is a zestful horror film with real energy and daft appeal
Potty! Justin Long as Wallace in Tusk
David Sexton12 September 2014

Just last year Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) was directed by Twitter to a listing that had been posted in Britain on gumtree.com. It said: "I've lived a long and storied life including a period when I was lost at sea with a walrus I named Gregory as my only companion. I have been for some time constructing a very realistic walrus suit. In exchange for free lodging, two hours a day your job would be to dress up in a walrus suit and make walrus noises. I will throw you fish and crabs."

Believe it or not, the listing was a spoof, by Brighton-based prankster Chris Parkinson. But Kevin Smith talked about the idea on his weekly "SModcast" with Scott Moser anyway, imagining what a great horror film it would make. His Twitter followers told him to make it. So he did. Here it is. One of the pottiest, or as Smith's fans like to say fucked up, movies you'll ever see.

Wallace (Justin Long) has found success in LA by creating a derisive weekly podcast for the "Not See Party" with his friend Teddy (Haley Joel Osment). They make fun of the latest clip to go viral, the "Kill Bill Kid", a Canadian teenager who has accidentally sliced off his own leg playing with a sword.

Cocky Wallace flies up to Winnipeg to interview the kid but on arrival finds to his annoyance the boy has just died. Casting around for a replacement, he spots a strange handwritten ad offering free accommodation in the home of an elderly man with seafaring stories to tell. He's hooked.

In his isolated mansion, wheel-chair bound Howard Howe (Michael Parks) does indeed have strange and impressive stories, about his acquaintance with Hemingway, for example, and peculiar items to show too, like a club of a bone that he says is from a walrus's cock. But Wallace, after drinking the man's tea, suddenly passes out.

When he wakes up, he is strapped into a wheelchair himself – and one of his legs has been roughly amputated below the knee. "Nature can be very red in tooth and claw", Mr Howe observes, correctly crediting Tennyson. It had to be done, he says, because Wallace had been bitten by a poisonous brown recluse spider and the leg had swollen up to the size of an elephant's. But then he starts tittering about this "arachnid assailant", the "itsy-bitsy spider". And meanwhile he is whittling what looks like a walrus's tusk. It is Wallace's missing tibia, being re-purposed. And that's just the start...

For two-thirds of its arc, the movie is zestful horror. But then it veers off into another mode, when we meet an alcoholic French Canadian detective, Guy Lapointe, who is hunting this serial killer who mutilates his victims so extensively, teaming up with Teddy and Wallace's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) to try to rescue him. Lapointe is played by Johnny Depp as a very broad caricature and with his appearance, Tusk changes into gonzo comedy, more a League of Gentlemen sketch than a real horror like The Human Centipede.

Yet the film has real energy and daft appeal. It's above all rewarding for the great performance as the sinister Mr Howe by Michael Parks, so unforgettable in Kill Bill 2 as the sibilant old pimp Esteban Vihaio who tells Beatrix Kiddo where to find Bill. Parks, now 76, has been a longterm favourite of both Tarantino and Kevin Smith and they're quite right to favour him. He's weirdly compelling: you lnow there's something not at all right about him but you can no more resist him than a bad dream. It's potty!

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