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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Twisted and sickening, yet oddly compelling, June 19, 2000
It's like a really bad traffic accident -- you're horrified and disgusted, but you can't look away. Technically, Duck! is pretty darn bad. It's got a muddy shot-on-video look, bad lighting, barely competent camera work, and the lowest production values you've probably ever seen. Duck! focuses on two high school outcasts: Derwin (William Hellfire) and Derrick (Joey Smack), who wear black trench coats every day just like the Trench Coat Mafia implicated in the Columbine tragedy. Every other character in the movie is a stereotype: the bullying jocks, a couple of friendless gothic kids, the Jesus-loving Christian girl, the wheelchair-bound retard, and the I-hate-everyone black kid. Derwin and Derrick are despised by just about everyone, of course, and Derwin even gets turned into a bloody mess by a bunch of students while taking a shortcut through the basketball court one day. Luckily, the filmmakers don't try to make you sympathize with the main characters. It's almost all a sick joke, yet you see that these two "freaks" are recognizably human. They simply refuse to conform to the ideas of how society and their peers think they should be. You can see how all this leads to such a tragedy. That's one of the problems with Duck! At times, it seems serious. Other times, it's just a sick joke. There's a scene with the bed-ridden Derwin talking to Derrick that's played totally straight -- and it's absolutely disturbing in its realism. They talk about how much they hate the expectations that society puts upon them, about how fake all their peers are. This is when they begin to discuss the idea of killing as many of their classmates as possible before blowing their own brains out. And though you can't possibly agree with what they're planning to do, you still see them as emotionally human. They were driven to this by a society that fears people they don't understand. That's what the news media failed to see when examining the Columbine massacre. They were quick to blame violent movies and videogames like Doom as the cause of such a disaster. Did they even think for a second of what it's like to be a social outcast in high school? How the high school social structure can back those who aren't "normal" into a corner from which they feel they can't escape? No way. If the media says it's movies, videogames, and Marilyn Manson driving kids to exterminate their classmates, then it must be true! The performances by Hellfire and Smack are totally convincing. And when the violent and gory climax arrives the only thing you can do is watch in shock; it's extremely unsettling in its own sick-joke way. You begin to imagine what it was really like when the two kids walked into the Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 and turned shotguns on their classmates. I want to condemn this movie and say it's sick and has no social value whatsoever. But I can't. It is sick and it will offend many people, but it has something to say. There is truth to be found in this twisted satire, but somehow it feels fake and honest at the same time. I can hardly nail this one down. After it's over, though, you'll almost surely feel so dirty that you'll have to take a shower just to wash that icky feeling away. It won't do any good, though. This one will stick with you for awhile.
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