dir: James Kleiner?
[img_assist|nid=74|title=Onions, by their very nature, not especially funny|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=225|height=300]
There is a shroud of mystery, a deathly pall hanging over this movie, the movie called The Onion Movie. What’s its story? What’s going on? How is Rodney Dangerfield in it? Hasn’t he been dead a long while? Has he risen from the grave, searching for the respect that long eluded him? Will his undead zombie be calling for “Brains!” or “Boobies”?
Two digressions: I’ll try to keep them quick. The real antecedent/origin of this flick is an attempt to make something along the lines of Kentucky Fried Movie or the Airplane/Flying High! movies. That’s the style of comedy that comes closest to this both in format and content. Since the movie uses the Onion television channel as its framing device, and the soothing, credible crooning of newsreader Norm Archer (Len Cariou) to link the various stories, with ads and other programs thrown in, it’s almost like it’s made to order template-wise according to the KFC spec.
The Onion, for those of you unfamiliar with the newspaper or the website, is a parody newspaper that distorts the news of the day not for ideological or empire-building purposes a la The Murdoch Empire, but for the purposes of humour through satirising the vacuity of the media itself. Famous headlines have included “Local Man Loses Cowardly Battle With Cancer”, “Depression Found to Hit Losers The Hardest”, and, upon the current US president’s re-election, “God’s Tool Back in White House”.
It is in marked contrast to newspapers like the long lamented Weekly World News that used to make up tabloid news along the lines of “Sleeping in fridge extends life 400 years”, “Elizabeth Taylor pregnant with alien Elvis’s Jesus lookalike love child” and “Jimmy Hoffa alive in Argentina and married to Hitler.”
There’s a distinct difference between the two, but perhaps not one that’s that noticeable to anyone who doesn’t care.
They (being whichever wrong-headed people thought this had commercial viability) started making this movie in 2003. It has languished shelfbound for so long that it has started to smell a bit. The Onion people have disowned it, the director(s) have disowned it, and yet somehow it’s found its way to a very limited form of release in 2008.
And, as with any limited form of release, like paying someone for a handjob, you question whether the expense entailed warranted the effort and ultimate result. Really, how happy are those happy endings after all?
Just to return to Kentucky Fried Movie for a moment, the humour there arose from direct rip-offs of contemporary movies, movie trailers and television. Who could forget the trailers for Catholic Schoolgirls in Trouble, Cleopatra Schwartz, or the Enter the Dragon parody A Fistful of Yen?
Lots of people, apparently. In a similar fashion, The Onion Movie develops many of its standalone sketches as unconnected elements linked through the construct of the news, with varying degrees of success. Many of the sketches, as well, to give dubious credit to the Onion folks where dubious credit is due, arise from some of the more memorable pseudo-articles the media monolith has been responsible for.
An armed gunman violently, pantyhose firmly over face, threatens the staff at a bank. But he doesn’t want money: he wants a job and the opportunity to improve his lot in life.
A nubile, writhing nymphette called Melissa Cherry, who looks more like Britney Spears than Britney Spears does, performs in almost-pornographic film clips with salacious lyrics but denies her songs, even ones that explicitly talk about blowing guys or being drilled in whatever position, have any sexual content. They’re about being a woman and having fun.
A jihadi terrorist, salivating, watches these clips and condemns them as decadent immoral Western filth, even as he dribbles all over himself whilst watching them.
The main movie trailer interspersed throughout the flick, which also impacts on poor newsreader Norm, is for a Steven Seagal film called Cockpuncher, about an American weakling who grows up to be a cockpuncher par excellence. It stars Steven Seagal. No shit.
In place of where Catholic School Girls in Trouble should be, instead there is an advert for the Queen Nathan pleasure cruise for twinks and butch bitches looking to literally cruise whilst they cruise. Cue scenes of guys going at it. Many scenes of moustachioed guys going at it.
Somehow it didn’t appeal as much to me as those scenes of Uschi Digard and her bounteous talents displayed in the shower scene in Catholic School Girls etc.
A dinner party goes awry when the host suggests they play the game that’s sweeping the nation: How to Host a Rape, modelled along those Cluedo-inspired games where people have to act out roles in order to figure out who the murderer is. Except in this case it’s a rape. The woman selected to play the victim protests way too much, which begs the question as to how people can be comfortable with such games when they refer to murder, but not with the alternative thus presented.
A man loses his socks. Chaos and media attention ensue. Another buys a computer, only to find out it’s been superseded by another computer. He buys the new one, and finds out there’s a new one about to come out again. He buys the next one, and finds it’s been superseded before even leaving the store. And then he kills Bill Gates with an axe.
An ugly, mean-spirited adult crashes a group of nerds at the library in order to play a Dungeons and Dragons equivalent game with them, with the intention of destroying their fun and ruining their game. After triumphing in the worst sore winner fashion, he seemingly gets his heartfelt wish by being transported to a magical realm where he could fight monsters for real if he so chose.
Racial stereotypes. Nuns drinking from beakers containing substances no-one should be drinking, with the exception of Courtney Love. Sponsored children treating the rest of their impoverished villagers like shit. Recovering addict Hollywood stars becoming addicted to aromatic teas. An Alzheimer’s March on Washington where the participants forget what they’re protesting for. Pornstars populating a press conference where they express their powerful urge to have America fuck them harder.
Is any of this funny? Does much of this tickle your fancy, or sound like utter crap?
Truth be told, at its best, like the website itself, it’s mildly amusing. I don’t remember laughing out loud once, but I do remember thinking that several sections were mildly amusing. Does it hang together, does it do a good job rendering some of The Onion’s more priceless ideas in a cinematic form? Eh…
It all ends up being very meh. Mixed results. Very mixed results. It tries to be button-pushy and transgressive, but it’s pretty mild overall. When it deals with the racial stereotypes it distinctly pulls punches that it reallocates to hits to the groin. And whilst it’s amusing to see Seagal take the piss out of himself, almost every film he’s done in the last two decades has been a parody of human behaviour and of films in general. Or, put more accurately, Seagal has now become a parody of a human being, if not more Hutt than human as it is. You can’t really take the micky out of yourself when you’re a pathetic sack of crap in the first place. Douchebags highlighting the fact that they’re douchebags only highlight the true magnitude of their douchebaggery.
I enjoyed it, cheap and mock nasty as it is. It’s very light and breezy, and moves at a steady clip. And at only around 80 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s also far funnier and far better crafted than the recent rash of Epic, Date, Disaster, Superhero, Scary, Meet the Spartans movies that end in Movie which are deathly unfunny and a blight upon humanity. There are actual jokes here, which is a step up from that laugh-free painfests that are those similarly styled parody nightmares.
The Onion Movie – it’s hard not to love people who coined the phrases and titled books such as Our Dumb Century and Our Dumb World.
6 times a pistol-whipping brother wants a hand up, not a hand out, out of 10
--
“The internet went down for three hours this morning, plunging the nation into productivity. The outage, which caused major work startages from New York to California, prevented an estimated 120 million American employees from messing around on the web at work.” – The Onion Movie
- 3403 reads