Review: 'Tusk'

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Civilians and critics alike, a lot of them, loved "Tusk" in Toronto, where it played the Midnight Madness sidebar of the international film festival earlier this month. And it's fun to have writer-director Kevin Smith, of "Clerks" and "Dogma," whose filmmaking star has fallen while his podcasting prowess has risen, once again at the center of a debate or two.

The chief argument regarding his "Human Centipede" riff is pretty basic: good trash or stupid trash? I'd say roughly half and half.

The origin story outranks the film itself. On Smith's podcast (smodcast.com) not long ago, the filmmaker and his co-host, Scott Mosier, got an hour's worth of spitballing from an ad found on a Craigslist-type site, Gumtree, in England. In the ad a Brighton man sought a roommate to dress up in a walrus costume and pretend to be a walrus, right down to the raw fish meals, in lieu of paying rent. Wouldn't it be funny, Smith and Mosier wondered, if the guy turned out to be a serial killer? You could blow that up into a horror film.

The ad was a hoax, but Smith started writing, got his money together, secured an uncredited A-list star and here we are. (The star, for the record, is Johnny Depp, and don't give me that spoiler-alert jazz: Smith and others have been yakking about Depp's involvement for months now.) The psycho with the walrus interest is played by Michael Parks, whom many recall from the TV show "Then Came Bronson" and other artifacts of days gone by. He acted in Smith's last movie, "Red State," and has been thrown some pretty tasty bones lately by, among others, Quentin Tarantino.

Justin Long's the nominal lead. Opposite Haley Joel Osment, he plays the co-host of a successful LA podcast who travels to Winnipeg to prank-interview an Internet star, only to arrive in time for his funeral. Needing a podcast idea fast, he spies a weird ad above a bar urinal, something about a sailor who's seen the world and wants to share his stories. The walruslike bulk of "Tusk" confines Long's character to the remote home of the aging seafarer, played by Parks. Out come the scalpels and the radical transformational surgery begins.

Smith treats it as "cringe humor," as the Long character's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) characterizes the podcast, with enough real anguish (especially after Long has his grotesque makeover) to keep it fake-real. As the Canadian with the silliest Quebecois accent in existence, Depp manages an extremely tricky thing: keeping a deadpan expression while selectively crossing his eyes for oddball comic effect.

I didn't draw much enjoyment from "Tusk," though Depp's turn has its charms. In the end Smith seems to be writing a Post-it note to himself. If you run a podcast, be nice, the movie says, or you run the risk of elective surgery in which your amateur doctor is making the decisions.

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Review: 'Tusk'

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