Kevin Smith’s new horror comedy (I guess) is Tusk – a weird body horror (I guess) comedy (I guess) about a podcaster (played by Justin Long) who falls into the mad doctor hands of an erudite old Canadian who misses the good old days of being shipwrecked and only having a caring walrus as a companion. So he turns Long into a walrus. A walrus makeup job that was stupid to the point of being laughable and I’m just not sure if that was the intention since the movie sometimes feels like it’s trying to be genuinely creepy (in very boring scenes) and sometimes feels like it’s going for comedy or satire.
What’s definite satire but just derails the movie is Johnny Depp making an uncredited appears as a French-Canadian homicide detective. Between his fake nose and his comically bad and stereotypical French-Canadian accent, it’s hard to tell if the movie hasn’t just given up on being anything other than farce.
Haley Joel Osment and Genesis Rodriguez also star but really just seem to exist to pad out the running time and give Johnny Depp weird things to do.
I’m kind of at a loss as to what I think of this movie. I was very bored and when I wasn’t bored, I was confounded about what it was trying to do. As a horror movie, it fails. As a body horror movie, it’s laughable. As a satire, I missed the joke. Unless it’s just a big joke on the Human Centipede, I suppose but even if that’s the case, it didn’t seem to say anything.
That’s a lot of words over a movie nobody is going to see.