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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Slackers Review, January 31, 2002
If you are an aspiring filmmaker/media producer, you know that seeing really good movies can provide much aspiration to create them someday. To marvel at classics such as Scorcese's Raging Bull, or bizarre works of art like Kubrik's Full Metal Jacket, it would seem to any young college visionary that their own cinematic masterpiece was just a dream away...
Then there's steaming piles of horse sh*t like Dewey Nick's Slackers that literally leave you embarrassed and spellbound at how such pathetic piles of waste could have possibly been green-lighted in Hollywood.
For those of you that don't know, a green light in the filmmakin' biz is when a movie gets the go ahead to be made. How Slackers avoided seeing more red lights than an underage hooker in Saigon is a complete mystery to me.
However, movies as awful as this one are still beneficial. How you ask? Well, if schlock like this can pass as viewable cinema, that gives a lot of hope to us aspiring filmmaker's out here who also have written horrible scripts that we had originally thought disposing of was the best plan. Well future Spielbergs and Scorceses, we were wrong! Dust off those Chupacabra screenplays and ideas for the 235th Batman and/or Rocky movie! Apparently in modern day Hollywood, anything goes!
"Anything goes" should have been the slogan for Slackers. The movie fights powerfully through an excruciatingly painful and embarrassing 90 minutes to be the biggest gross out comedy of recent years. In some ways, it succeeds. There's oral sex, masturbation, urinating, and elderly whore sponge-bathing, all so un-tastefully done that the makers of the film would have been better off leaving out all of the other scenes and just making it one big ball of shock value.
Don't mistake me though. When I say "shock value," in this case it means something more along the lines of "Wow, I'm shocked that someone actually made a movie that was this incredibly despicable. What I wouldn't give to meet the people responsible for this `film' so I could castrate them as an appetizer to a main course of offing them execution style in the street on national television." You know, that kind of shock value.Attention: There are plot/surprise spoilers ahead. But you really should read on, because if you go into this movie expecting all the stupidity that you will be in store for, you may be more prepared and not kill yourself after witnessing this awful creation.
The movie opens on a college campus (note: forgive me for leaving out details sometimes in the rest of this review. I didn't know I was going to review it until I saw how bad it was) where three lazy guys rule with a tired fist. Hahaha! Get it! Cause they're slackers!
Anyhoo, while cheating on a test for his friends, the ring leader of the slackers (Devon Sawa, don't remember his name in the movie) is unknowingly being observed by the biggest dork on campus, Cool Ethan, who is obsessed with a girl that Sawa is sitting next to and hitting on during the test.
Like, the name "Cool" Ethan the plot of this movie sucks. Ready for this? Okay! Since Ethan saw Sawa cheating on the test and hitting on his crush, he's going to turn in Sawa and his two slacker buddies for cheating if they don't get him hooked up with his dream girl. That's right, it's the same recycled crap-cake if you don't do this than I'll do that formula you've seen over, and over and over again in teen movies. It's at its worst here, trusting me.
Predictably, "Cool" Ethan is anything but. In fact, he's pretty much a freakin' psychopath. No kidding, this guy's mental illness really takes away from any humor that was supposed to come from this role. He shaves his chest hair in the shape of the first letter of the dream girl's name, he makes a doll of her out of strands of her hair that he seeks out all cross campus, and he has an extensive collection of videos and photographs of her.
Ethan has a shower scene in the movie, which he sings and pees on himself. It has absolutely no purpose in the plot or any relevance the film might have. This scene pretty much sums up the entire film: it exists only as a vehicle for pure ridiculousness.
Another pointless scene involves one of Sawa's buddies singing accompanied by none other than his penis with some sort of a puppet on it. If anyone sees it you can correct me if I'm wrong (klarkbar@hotmail.com), but I'm pretty sure his penis is actually alive. Yes, as I recall he is not doing a ventriloquist act, his penis is literally an organism that moves rhythmically and sings.
Now I know what you're thinking, some of this actually sounds funny, right? Well, I might have said the same thing had I just heard about this, or, I dare say, viewed these scenes independent of the rest of the movie. But I really don't think they'd be the slightest bit funny even then, and with the rest of the movie, they just work to make it ten times worse than it already is minus the gross out scenes. I'd like to note that I've only mentioned a couple out of many, but not a one of them makes a bit of sense or is the slightest bit funny.
I saw people walk out of this movie. They walked out of a free preview of an unreleased movie early in the film. Keep in mind a lot of these kids were likely freshman in the dorms that more or less had nothing else to do, and they walked out. When only a quarter of the pointless gross outs had happened. I've never walked out of a movie and I vow to never do so. I've slept through them, eaten through them, necked through them and made fun of them, but I've always been against the walking out thing because I thought it was silly to walk out of something you had played for, or in this case pass up a cool opportunity in seeing a movie that wasn't going to be released nationally for another week. I now have sympathy for the walkers. I still will never walk from a movie, but I understand now.
This movie is terrible. The acting is horrible. Sawa seems to have the repeated misfortune of being cast in tasteless gross-out teen movies (Idle Hands). Hey Devon, I have an idea for your next movie. Kill your agent, poop on him, and then base the movie on the true story of of your grisly fecal murder. Make sure you get an incredibly horrible screenwriter, and also make sure to be a stoner in the movie, which for some reason on screen you are predisposed to doing on screen in every stupid movie you do. At least Idle Hands was kind of funny sometimes even if it was a stupid kind of funny. This movie made me laugh once, and I'm pretty sure it was out of pity.
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DVD ~ Tom Everett Scott
DVD ~ Jason Schwartzman
DVD ~ Flex Alexander
DVD ~ Phe Caplan
DVD ~ William Baldwin
