Thursday, November 22, 2012

The Cinema File #35: "Thankskilling 3" Review


I thought I'd gotten far enough away from Breaking Wind to take on another impossibly bad movie, I just didn't realize it would be so soon.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I hope you enjoyed your time with your family and or friends, and or sad drunken stupor if you have no family and or friends. I spent my Thanksgiving waiting for a ride to a movie that never came, and watching the worst straight to DVD feature I've seen since, well, early this week. In defense of Thankskilling 3, it is clear from the outset that unlike some other movies I've watched lately, this one is actually trying to be bad. That being said, that's not a fucking worthy endeavor, and you don't get points for accomplishing your goal if your goal was to shit all over my day with your unbearable movie.



I didn't see the first Thankskilling, though from what I understand it was basically a typical slasher movie plot with a killer turkey as the villain, while this film is completely unrelated except for the type of main bad guy. When I say unrelated, I don't just mean to the previous movie, but also to all good sense, understanding of basic narrative structure, and simple common decency. And in case you're wondering, no, there is no Thankskilling 2. The plot of Thankskilling 3, to the flimsy extent that one exists, centers around the fact that Thankskilling 2 was so terrible, that it became a sort of cursed movie like the Ring, and now its a race to find the last known copy to stop the evil Turkey who starred in the film from using it to destroy the world. I get the impression that I'm supposed to find this cute as some bit of meta self-awareness, but because the rest of the film is so god-awful, I can't quite make the leap.

Tim and Eric ain't got nothing on Thankskilling 3. This movie takes the premise of every shitty Adult Swim cartoon and cranks up the random bullshit dial to eleven. Things that I am left to assume are supposed to be jokes are flung at your face at a rapid pace, rarely connecting to each other or anything else that comes before or after them, and almost none of them are even remotely close to funny. There's a foul mouthed rapping grandma and a brief non-sequiter cartoon interlude where a cat flies up a man's ass, then a worm that shoves it's tail up a robot's ass while repeating a "Butt-er churn" "joke" over and over again, and just when you've stopped not laughing at all of that, two rats start smelling each others' farts to guess what kinds of cheese they ate.

Breaking Wind, Part 1 was bad, but at least it was relatably bad. At least I understood why it was made and what the audience was for it, even if I thought it was painfully poor in execution. I have no idea who this was meant for outside of the people who made it and seem to think their personal in-jokes are hilarious. I want to say there was one somewhat amusing running gag where a character dies, and then proceeds to welcome all the other characters who die to heaven with increasingly absurd promises of peace and happiness, but I suspect I may have just been desperately reaching for something to laugh at amid this mess of soul sapping anti-humor. Oh, and there's an Evil Dead reference where a character loses their dick and straps a chainsaw to his crotch, which might have actually been funny and even a bit clever if it was done in a better overall movie.

And the bitch of it is, in some ways this is the kind of movie I want to see, just done about as shittily as one could do it. Just in terms of the dark imagery and twisted fantasy atmosphere with an almost all-puppet cast of characters, this should be right up my alley. If I hold anything against this film more than anything else, its that they pretty much set out to make my perfect movie, and then made it as unwatchable as they possibly could, as if to personally spite me. If it were any other movie, I'd say that was a silly notion, that a movie would be made specifically to assault the tastes of one individual, but then this movie is so abstract that I can believe they actually looked me up, learned what kind of movies I like, and then set out to make a movie to twist those preferences into an unholy concoction of crap to drive me insane.

That, or they just made a really dumb movie with puppets. Either way, Thankskilling 3 is not a movie, well, at all, quite frankly, let alone one you will ever want to watch. Don't listen to anyone who tells you that its good, or that its so bad its good, or that if you like this or that thing, than you'll like this, because trust me, you fucking won't. Because I laughed once, and again possibly only out of desperation, I can't quite say that it was as bad as Breaking Wind, but its damn close.

Then again, I'm the guy who liked Vamps, so what do I know?

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