In a way I applaud the producers of The Greasy Strangler for sticking to its filmmakers vision, audience be damned. It’s inexpensive enough it doesn’t need to be mass marketable, and there is maybe 1% of people who will think it’s brilliant. For them it is uncompromised. I am not one of them. I am part of the 99% this time and I have to represent how The Greasy Strangler will play for the rest of us.
It’s going for a Tim and Eric kind of tone of awkward, abrasive comedy where the joke is how far they push something that’s not funny. Big Ronnie (Michael S. Michaels) and Brayden (Sky Elobar) are father and son giving fake tours of sites they say had something to do with famous music. They wear pink turtlenecks and short shorts, but be glad for their uniforms because they spend the rest of the movie naked. Big Ronnie is the Greasy Strangler, covering himself with grease and murdering his tour customers at night.
I’m not into Tim and Eric either but I get how they’re challenging comedy tropes, and every once in a while they come up with something memorable like shrim. Ronnie and Brayden keep repeating things over and over, hoping you’ll move past being annoyed to finding it absurdly funny. He and a tourist argue over free drinks in a scene that intentionally adds nothing to the film. There are several intentionally abrasive exchanges like this. Delivery isn’t flat per se, but the inflection is wrong, again intentionally.
Keeping the characters naked at home, in speedos at first but full frontal for the second half of the film, is forcing us to look at these bodies gratuitously. When a love triangle forms with Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo), I suppose we might applaud them for presenting a non photoshopped woman in this media landscape, but they give her exaggerated pubes just like they give Ronnie a prosthetic penis with a red tip that looks infected. I’m not sure the agenda is anything other than ridiculing these bodies, but mission accomplished because they sure present them disgustingly.
Ronnie’s thing is grease. He wants more grease on everything. Isn’t that funny! Putting grease on foods that aren’t even greasy to begin with! And it’s so slimy and gooey!
The kills are graphic and it’s not all strangulation. Sometimes the strangulation causes other gory effects. One with a nose is truly disgusting. As the strangler, Ronnie looks like a mutant covered head to toe in crusted on grease. He looks like when Paul McCrane in Robocop fell into toxic waste.
There’s a conundrum when you’re intentionally making a “bad movie.” How bad do you make it before you’re no longer commenting on it and you’re just another offender? Troma are the masters of it but they know their tone. They are celebrating what’s awesome about underfunded, under skilled genre movies, and the subversive messages some of those films can champion. Greasy Stranger isn’t celebrating anything. It’s a drunken conversation of “wouldn’t it be funny if…” It’s not funny for one minute on screen, let alone 90. I think documenting my displeasure only reinforces what the filmmakers were going for, so I’m glad I could help.
