VERY BAD MOVIE

One of the first scenes in Very Bad Things is the gruesome death of a prostitute. From there, the movie just gets more and more disturbingly violent. And it's a comedy. Where does one even begin?

First of all by nothing that dark comedy is where it's at in contemporary Hollywood. The one movie in recent years that was an unqualified success, both critically and commercially, was a sort of dark comedy: Pulp Fiction. Maybe it's more profitable to compare this latest incarnation of the genre to another dark comedy, one trashed by critics and rejected by the public: The Cable Guy. Perhaps only myself and a few other moviegoers, most of them residing in attics or asylums, think that The Cable Guy was a brilliant film. Nonetheless, it's a useful point of comparison for what a dark comedy should try to be, and what makes Very Bad Things a failure.

What The Cable Guy had, Very Bad Things lacks: a comedic actor working with disturbing material, scenes of psychological violence and moments when the veil of horror is rent, revealing dark humor underneath. What Very Bad Things has, The Cable Guy did not: an ensemble of characters who--despite including pseudo-stars like Christian Slater--never quite mesh, scenes of physical violence and moments when the superficial horror turns out to conceal nothing besides yet more superficiality. And blood. Blood, limbs and gore, in all of their nauseating variations. Here is where Very Bad Things shows itself to be neither "dark" nor "comedy." Somehow Peter Berg, the director, has decided that because the severing of an ear can be a scene at once terrifying and hilarious in Reservoir Dogs, then any scene of dismemberment is terrifying and hilarious. Dismemberment, per se, is neither, as Very Bad Things shows us again and again. This movie is somehow under the impression that dark comedy is the easiest of genres, one part jokes to five parts gore, when what makes it so fascinating is that it is so difficult.

In lieu of the challenges of making a movie at once disturbing and funny, Very Bad Things makes, God help us, a point. Its "message" will be familiar to anyone who has read Lord of the Flies or anything else in the "civilzed people aren't really so civilized" genre. Perhaps the real horror of this movie is how the clich‚--which, like the Jaws or the "Jason" serieses, will never go away--has come back to terrorize us once again. Kyle Fisher (Jon Favreau) and Laura Garrety (Cameron Diaz) are a happy couple, soon to be married. Kyle goes with his buddies to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. They do a lot of drinking and a little murdering. They return. Their sins themselves do not haunt them, but rather the realization that they have always been savages underneath. So is everyone else. The happy couple is not as happy as they seem. Surprise.

Mr. Berg, a star of "Chicago Hope," is the latest refugee from television to land on the shores of Hollywood. This, presumably, is what gives Very Bad Things its one virtue: It does not look like television. This is partly because much of its content would be censored by all but the most `liberal' cable channels, but it's also because the director appreciates the one aspect of this medium that television completely lacks: the visceral possibilities of the big screen. While the more "artsy" montage scenes in Very Bad Things resemble nothing so much as MTV, there are some moments when the look of the movie actually edges towards the cinematographic. Of course, for every step the director takes forward, he takes 10 back. In fact, the most obvious faults of Very Bad Things, namely its superficiality and simplicity, could be placed under the general heading of film infected by television. As with television, what is interesting and alive--here the genre of dark comedy--is co-opted and stripped of all but its superficial aspects. As on television, superficiality is matched only by simplicity, which is here manifested in the movie's cliched message and--even more obviously--in its title. While the title has a pretension of ironic under-statement, the movie takes it quite literally: this is a movie where a series of Very Bad Things happen, no less and certainly no more.

Presumably, Very Bad Things will be ignored by all but those who evaluate movies in terms of shock and gore. Jon Favreau and the other talented people involved in this movie will presumably go on to, if not Great, at least Somewhat Better Things. The question of whether dark comedy, which was so vital so recently, can survive is unresolved. Certainly the existence of the movie paints a pessimistic picture of what happens to innovators in Hollywood: their innovations are derivatively imitated or altogether scorned. Such were the fates of Pulp Fiction and The Cable Guy, respectively. One hopes, however, that despite all of the industry's calculations and simplifications, a few good dark comedies are slouching towards Hollywood to be born.