Bunny Ultramod, Hollywood Art Critic
I recently mentioned attending “Punisher: War Zone” at the New Beverly as part of Patton Oswalt’s Deeper in the Dark series, but there was another film playing on that bill, and I feel I should mention it, as it’s utterly mad.
The film is titled “The Catechism Cataclysm,” made by a man named Todd Rohal, who the internet tells me was once badly frightened as a boy when several Scout leader faked their own deaths as part of a first aid demonstration. Word was he was working on a film about that experience. I cannot say for certain that this film was the result, but it wouldn’t be an unfair guess, as this is a film about a canoe trip that goes very badly.
The film is built around the considerable and very particular talents of Steve Little. The actor is best known for his work on “Eastbound and Down,” where he plays a band teacher with a mixture of oppressive sincerity and spectacular thickness. Here he plays a variation of that — an awkward manchild who has somehow wound up as a priest, and still nurses a childlike fascination for his sister’s high school boyfriend, played by Robert Longstreet, who has aged into a gruff, disappointed spotlight operator for Ice Capades-style shows. The two take a day off to canoe together, despite the fact that Longstreet has almost no memory of Little.
Longstreet’s character has a knack for telling short, strange, ambiguous stories about people thrust together by a universe with a perverse sense of humor, and he doesn’t realize it, but he’s living one of those stories. Their canoe trip starts off as a series of amiable, if combative, conversations. But as they work their way through their beer supply and realize they may have become lost, the two grow increasingly irritated with each other. Further, the whole film has been interrupted by smash edits and roaring metal guitar chords, both suggesting a horror film, rather than a road comedy.
Eventually, three fellow travels join them. Two of them are young women from Japan and one is an African-American man in a track suit, reading glasses, and a murderous glare. They insist their names are Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim, respectively, and they have brought some sort of electronic musical device with them. And this is the moment the film goes off the rails, and I refuse to explain further, except that it ends with a protracted scene of Steve Little running through the woods, sobbing and gibbering.
What I have skipped is likely to outrage a percentage of audience members. No less than Hitchcock complained about these sorts of narrative events, saying that putting surprises in a film is a gimmick and unlikely to satisfy an audience. He was right, to a certain extent. It’s very easy to have a story make a sudden, outrageous turn, and it tends to irritate audiences more than it entertains them. In this instance, however, the film has been hinting throughout that it will just break down into lunacy at some point.
I would argue that films often make this promise, and then deliver an utterly quotidian idea of madness. It’s rare that a movie offers something genuinely demented, as this one does. I watched it with a certain fear that, when the events ended, we would discover that they were a fantasy or a dream. But, no, the film refuses to take back anything it has done, and refuses to explain any of it. To my tastes, the results were hilarious and horrifying in equal measure. It never really stops being a comedy, although a decidedly oddball one — Steve Little’s eventual hysterical attempt to sum up the events of the evening are a comic tour de force. But his fear is sharpened by the fact that there is real reason for it, and for the fact that they are beyond comprehension. There’s real horror there, and it is a horror that I’m not sure I have seen before.
For one night, the usual rules of the world were turned off. The universe expressed its sense of humor, and it turned out to be more perverse and mad than could have been predicted.
