Catfish Jackson has seen TUSK at TIFF2014! Can't wait to see this!!! Coo Coo Ca Choo!!!

For those who don’t know, Kevin Smith's Tusk began on Smith’s podcast as a joke over an Internet story about a man forced to wear walrus suit in exchange for room and board. The story turned out to be fake, but Smith asked his fans to vote #WalrusYes or #WalrusNo on Twitter to the possibility of developing the idea into a film. Due the power of democracy, a political ideal for which much blood has been shed, Tusk had its world premiere at TIFF Midnight Madness on Saturday night. 

 

Tusk is the story off asshole podcaster Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) who travels to Winnipeg to interview a minor Internet celebrity. The celebrity proves to be unreachable, but Bryton believes he’s scored an even bigger coup by responding to a bulletin board posting left by the mysterious Howard Howe (Michael Parks). Howe claims to have lived a life of adventure at sea and wants to share his stories. Bryton travels to Howe’s home in the remote wilderness, and is regaled by a story of Howe’s great, long ago friendship with a walrus named Mr. Tusk. Mr. Tusk allegedly rescued Howe when he was lost at sea, and Howe has spent his life trying to re-create their special bond. Sure enough, Howe is not the harmless old coot that he initially seems to be, and things get gruesome in a way that combines elements of Frankenstein, The Human Centipede, and Cronenberg’s The Fly.  

 

It’s difficult to criticize a film like Tusk because it reaches the bar that it sets for itself; unfortunately, that bar happens to be pretty low. The film aspires to be nothing more than a weird little movie about a half-man half-walrus creature, and that’s exactly what it is. The acting is uniformly good, particularly from Parks, who isn’t satisfied with just showing up. He makes Howe into fully-realized horror villain with shades of nuance, whereas other members of the cast seem a little too pleased with themselves just for being part of such a silly project. A major Hollywood star appears as a French Canadian detective and he’s unrecognizable under a layer of heavy prosthetics (SPOILER ALERT: it’s Johnny Depp), but you get the sense that he’s just having a bit of fun doing 2 days worth of semi-improvised work on a tiny film, and nothing more. Similarly, the man-walrus suit designed by Robert Kurtzman looks like it came from Leatherface’s aquarium, and it’s kinda cool, but it’s also very cheesy. It’s as though Smith saw the design, thought “holy shit, that actually DOES look like a man-walrus suit!”, and no further thought was given to how the suit might be made more realistic. The mere fact that the suit was a reality was enough. 

 

Ultimately, that’s the problem with Tusk – it’s so happy just to exist, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of B-movie greatness that it might have been able to achieve. The long set up sequence between Long and Parks in Howe’s creepy house is tense and effective; it belongs in a scarier movie. Smith might be static as a director, but he’s a more than capable writer, and these actors know what they’re doing. The ingredients are all here for something genuinely scary and non-ironic, but Smith hides behind “I realize this is stupid” instead of really going for a flat-out horror show and risking failure. 

 

During the post-show Q&A the always-engaging Smith said repeatedly how proud he was to have turned some silly little joke on his podcast into an actual, fully realized film. Good for him for making his joke a reality, I guess, but the too-cool-to-care-what-you-think posturing doesn’t fool anyone. There was a time when Smith was a major voice in indie cinema, and he had something to say. Chasing Amy and Dogma, whatever their flaws, are ambitious films. Even the recent Red State had the benefit of being a sincere comment on modern American politics. But Tusk is neither ambitious nor sincere. Tusk is a middle finger to the concepts of ambition and sincerity. “You don’t like what I do when I try?”, he says to the haters. “Fine, then I’m gonna make a movie about a fucking man-walrus.” The stupidity of the concept has immunized Smith to the venom of his critics, but it’s also given us a film that feels unworthy of a writer/director who we know can do better. 

 

Tusk is fine. Fans of genre films will appreciate it for 100 minutes. Drink some stuff or smoke some stuff and go see it, because God knows no one outside of the internet film community is going to. Hopefully Smith has been creatively rejuvenated by the experience of doing exactly what he wanted to do, and he can apply that rejuvenated sensibility to something more substantial.