Holy fucking shit.

When a podcaster, Wallace Bryton (Justin Long), goes up to Canada for an interview that doesn’t happen he finds himself desperate to save the trip and answers an ad by Howard Howe (Michael Parks) who promises that he has many stories to tell about epic nautical adventures. Unfortunately, Howe’s real plan is to surgically turn Wallace in to a walrus. After managing a frantic phone call to his girl friend Ally (Genesis Rodriguez) and his best friend/podcasting partner Teddy (Haley Joel Osment), the two rush to Manitoba to try and find Wallace. And then a lot of things happen.

Some things before continuing I have to mention right off the top that I am now and have always been a massive Kevin Smith fan. So I am more inclined than not to like his material and I feel like that should be mentioned before plunging into this given how enormously polarizing I feel this movie will be.

I saw Tusk a week ago and this review has been hanging over me since, glaring at me from the corner for putting it off. I don’t like to offer knee jerk reactions to things and I like to let material settle a bit. When you are dealing with a movie like this, the marination period takes a bit longer. My reaction to the movie was very visceral if not entirely clear and I have had a pretty difficult time shaking it from my head since the credits rolled. In fact, I just sat there in the theater staring at the screen, not really reading the credits as they scrolled by, but just unable or willing to get up and leave. This sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t. This movie is really fucked up and it did a number on me something fierce.

With it’s origins coming from a discussion Smith had with Scott Mosier on their podcast, Tusk is a movie that sounds very silly and like the kind of purposefully bad movie that I love so much. Over the top shit that is in on the joke, that kind of thing. Tusk isn’t really that at all. It is silly and has a robust sense of humor with weird and quirky characters and sequences that are very funny but where most horror movies use humor as a pressure valve to let the audience off the emotional hook, Tusk uses it to crank the vise down harder. There are scenes which intercut with each other in which one scene is horrific and disturbing and then the next is super goofy and quirky character work. Some viewers might find these cuts jarring and tone breaking but for me they served to drive the tension and Wallace’s terror home. It keeps the viewer off emotional balance and the horror is intensified when you cut to something normal like a goofball eating burgers in a weird way at a fast food place. Maybe it is just me but the fact that a dude can be mutilated while his friends are doing mundane or silly things makes it feel more intense.

The effects and make up have their moments when they veer into unconvincing territory, but on the whole they look good and if you are on board with the premise, they can be pretty stomach churning. I have a fairly low tolerance for torture in films in general and surgical torture in particular so I may be more susceptible to this than the average viewer. But For me, it looked good and I was fairly well grossed out.

Performancewise, I felt everyone did well here. Justin Long did a great job as a smarmy dick early in the film and did equally well as a tortured victim. Genesis Rodriguez and Haley Joel Osment handled their ends very well and balanced their love and contempt for Wallace perfectly. While most fans probably know already, I don’t want to spoil one surprise cast member here and will only say that the part was played in a batshit crazy way that works surprisingly well given the silliness and context.

The real standout here was Michael Parks, which is usually the case when Michael Parks is in a film. His line deliveries are uniformly captivating and I could listen to him talk about anything for any amount of time. It was true in Red State and it is true here. And it really doesn’t matter what Parks is doing either. Tusk sees him swing from comedic to deadly serious in a heart beat and the common thread between the extremes is that it is always commanding of attention and unsettling. The movie would not have worked as well as it did with out him.

Tusk is not perfect and there are places I wish it had gone deeper than it did but that is kind of testament to just how compelling it is because I felt acutely uncomfortable for most of the run time but I wanted more anyway. It disturbed me quite a bit and I am not sure that I would say that it was ‘fun’ really but it certainly did not make me bored or indifferent. I enjoyed the use of the unreliable narrator by showing flashbacks of scenes from other characters’ perspectives and that said a lot to me about how we perceive ourselves versus how others perceive us. I would have liked even more of that but what I got added some extra layers and made the experience feel fuller than it would have otherwise been.

Conclusion [9.0 out of 10]

So here is the thing: a lot of people aren’t going to like this. It is very out there and disturbing and some people may just not buy into it at all in the first place. It is hard to make a recommendation on something like this but I just say that if you like the idea of a sadistic madman turning a dude into a walrus against the backdrop of jokes about Canada then you should go see this right away. If that sounds like a piece of shit to you then you are better off seeing something more to your taste. If you are in the latter category, I understand but you should probably also not whine about the theaters being full of remakes, sequels and rehashed love stories. Tusk is something you haven’t seen before and I doubt strongly you will leave without an emotional reaction. I leave it to you to decide where you fall on this but for me it is definitely #WalrusYes.