Father's Day
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- Release Date: October 21, 2011
- Directed by: Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matt Kennedy, Steven Kostanski and Conor Sweeney
- Written by: Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matt Kennedy, Steven Kostanski and Conor Sweeney
- Runtime: 1 hour 38 minutes
I'm sure everyone has had the experience of watching a movie trailer and before it's even over with, you know that you have to see the movie as soon as you can. During my first or second year of college, a good friend of mine showed me the trailer for Father's Day, and we soon made it a point to watch it together. If you've seen how incredibly dumb that trailer is, the movie delivers that exact experience, but feature-length.
Plot-wise, the only thing you need to know about Father's Day is that it follows a priest, a gay man, an eyepatch-wearing badass, and his stripper sister as they work together to hunt down Chris Fuchman, a demonic serial killer who targets fathers. The movie was released by Troma, and if you're familiar with their exercises in bad taste such as Terror Firmer or even the Toxic Avenger films, then you pretty much know what to expect with this one. The movie is packed to the brim with excessive bloodshed, the foulest of language, homophobia, rape, incest, cannibalism, basically anything you can think of that would be considered "controversial." It's a very offensive movie and isn't afraid to break taboos. Because of this, if you're more of a mainstream horror fan, you'll probably want to steer pretty clear of this one. However, if you're aware of Troma's sense of humor and the fact that they make deliberately shocking and schlocky films to have fun, then you'll have a blast.
Along with the deliberate shock value, there are other things about the movie that I genuinely like. It's a low-budget production, but it doesn't cheap out when it comes to effects. Buckets of fake blood are spilled on screen, a man is set on fire in one scene, and when the film moves to Hell for its climax, the demonic Fuchman even has a man-in-suit final form. There is a bit of shoddy green-screen work going on, but other than that, the filmmakers managed to pull off some pretty fun effects scenes with their shoestring budget of $10,000. The movie also uses over saturated colors and fake film grain to give it a similar "grindhouse" feeling to films such as Hobo with a Shotgun. It even has a fake trailer midway through its runtime for a nonexistent Star Wars rip-off called Star Raiders. It's one of my favorite parts of the movie, and if I can be honest, it's very much in the vein of something that I would like to make myself. I love it when film fans with no budget have the dedication to get their wacky projects made, regardless of how low-brow and ridiculous it may be.
I'm honestly not sure how to end my thoughts on this one. What other movie features chainsaw-wielding strippers, a demonic serial killer who eats people's junk, and a scene where our protagonists blow their own brains out so they can go to Hell and save the day? This is the only one that I can think of that features all of that and then some. If you want to unplug your brain and enjoy a movie that's pure entertaining trash, then track this one down.