The Greasy Strangler

Having been funded by the British Film Institute and listing Hollywood A-Lister Elijah Wood and British directing genius Ben Wheatley among its many producers, it would be fair to assume that The Greasy Strangler would have some kind of intelligent, highbrow, social commentary running throughout it.

It doesn't....at all....not even slightly. And it's all the better for it.

The debut feature from British director Jim Hosking tells the tale of failed music promoter Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels) and his cheesy old cornball son, Brayden (Sky Elobar), who run a walking tour of disco landmarks in downtown LA. When hootie-tootie disco cutie, Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo) arrives on the scene, the pair commence battle for her affections. All while the titular crazed killer terrorises the city's streets at night.

To explain any more would give away the threadbare plot, but anyone who remembers the 80's schlock-shock fare from Troma films or John Waters will be on familiar ground here, with cartoonish, gory violence, frequent full-frontal nudity (male and female, but mostly male) and a full supporting cast of outlandishly freakish characters (a personal favourite being Oinker, a man with a fake pig snout and rather fetching ladies shoes "I'm renting them").

The comedy in this film is extremely crass and not for the faint of heart (or stomach). It is also very hit and miss, multiple scenes are just characters repeating the same line over and over and over again, often a good thirty seconds to a minute past the point they stopped being funny. This is a comedy technique I'm fond of in stand-up when used well (see Richard Herring or Stewart Lee), but it's used far too frequently in this and it just began to grate. There is also repeated use of the word bullshit (seriously, it must have been said 150-200 times in the films 93 minute run time), which may have been designed to signify the limited vocabularies of the characters, but it just made me feel that they could have done with a more ruthless script editor and a couple more drafts. The only thing that may prevent The Greasy Strangler from entering the upper echelons of quotable cult-classic status is that literally half of the script is the line "I call bullshit on that" repeated ad nauseum. Napoleon Dynamite may have only uttered the line "I like your sleeves, they're real big" once, but by god I'm gonna be quoting that and numerous other lines from that film until the day I die. Having said all this, when the jokes hit, they hit hard and gave me enough belly laughs to carry me through the times that they didn't.