Perhaps the funniest thing about it will be the attempts of stuffy, befuddled film critics who vainly try to explain the movie’s “plot” or analyze the appeal of crudely animated, trash-talking menu items. The ironic misadventures of Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad, along with their grumpy, wife beater and gold chain-clad human neighbor Carl, will stun, mystify and appall the uninitiated, and tickle the shit out of the cult, obviously grown large enough to support a theatrical release.
Rejecting all conventional notions of entertainment value, the comedic style is an aggressively silly blend of pop-culture parody, scatology and free-flowing absurdity rambling from gag to gag with a reckless obliqueness and all-too-hip self-awareness.
Some of it’s very smart and funny stuff, but it dares you to get the point of its pointlessness, which the Boston Police Department missed during the infamous promotion stunt. The intentionally incoherent storyline follows the lads on a dual quest for the missing pieces of a massively destructive exercise machine called “the Insane O-Flex” and to uncover their own origins. Along for the ride are various show regulars, including a thug rapping spider in a diaper, the robotic chicken ghost of Christmas Past and “the Mooninites,” arrogant, two-dimensional villains who look and move like sprites from an Atari 2600 console. Other sights include flaming chickens, exploding kittens, a scary female body builder and a dude with a video tape player in his head, which makes Shake declare: “It’s Like David Cronenbergian up in here.” Indeed.
Brilliant in 15 minute doses, at just under ninety minutes the joke is stretched well past the breaking point, a point not lost on creators Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis, whose script keeps smugly commenting on the film’s own crapulence and on the fact they have your money. In risking a lazy reviewer cliché let’s say your enjoyment of this nonsense will be directly proportional to your herb intake, and it’s true; this is comedy made expressly for stoners, and all that talking food is bound to give someone the munchies.
Corey Hall writes about film for Metro Times. Send comments to [email protected].
