"You don`t know what good comedy is".
But I do - which is why I think Very Bad Things is well overrated on IMDb. To be honest, it did have a few scenes that were actually funny (like the Stern guy bumbling in the gas station... and Slater declaring the van`s full of love... or that other guy wailing and howling at the funeral), but mostly the jokes fell totally flat. Not to mention the most basic failing of the writer(s), the inability to comprehend that certain things simply are too far gone on the grisly side to be funny, no matter how you spin them - like, for instance, mutilation, or re-composing of corpses. Generally speaking, I`m very f-cking far from being an advocate for good taste in movies, but this little fillum here really does cluelessly cross the line and I doubt even a truly gifted filmmaker could have made it work much better. So, for once I actually do agree with Roger Ebert`s moral judgement - this movie is indeed pretty reprehensible stuff. It plays sort of like a very crass and stupid man`s The Hangover - and that film itself wasn`t exactly your highbrow entertainment to begin with. Peter Berg should stick to acting - after all, he was hilarious in The Last Seduction.
Also, Rene Russo did bite down on Slater`s balls hard (in a desperately unfunny scene), so the "hit in the balls" department is also pretty much covered.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
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MaximRecoil (4845)
4 years ago
"But I do"
Obviously not.
"To be honest, it did have a few scenes that were actually funny (like the Stern guy bumbling in the gas station... and Slater declaring the van`s full of love... or that other guy wailing and howling at the funeral)"
Those weren't the funny scenes. For example, in the gas station scene, the guy asking him how he likes the minivan during Stern's comically-expressed exasperation and paranoia was funny. Stern bumbling in the store was just physical comedy, and not a shining example of it either. The scene gets funny again when Stern gets back into the minivan - "They didn't have any fucking Whizzers!" - followed by peeling out and then slamming on the brakes to avoid a head-on collision which propels his wife's face into the dashboard, followed immediately by a shot of his wife with a bandaged nose.
"It plays sort of like a very crass and stupid man`s The Hangover"
You have that exactly backwards. "The Hangover" is a lowest common denominator comedy, perfectly designed to make dumb guys laugh. Also, your attempt to appraise other people's intelligence is ironic, considering you listed some run of the mill physical comedy as one of the highlights of humor in Very Bad Things.
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