At Ellis Dee’s suggestion, I put this on my Netflix queue a couple weeks ago and am now watching it and, holy fuck, it’s gruesome. I mean, sure, I’m enjoying it and all but this is a disturbing film. The scene where the security guard is murdered had me recoiling from my monitor in disgust (something I can only remember doing one other time, at the curb stomp in American History X) and his squealing while he died made my stomach churn. Just typing about it now is making me shiver.
I’m enjoying it though. I like black comedies and this is proving to be the blackest I’ve seen yet. I guess I’m more masochistic than I thought.
I utterly hated this movie, quite apart from Christian Slater’s bad Jack Nicholson impersonation and Cameron Diaz’s shrill whining. I’ve seen my share of violent movies, Tarantino included, but this just seemed to be detestable for detestability’s sake, with no redeeming wit or depth.
Take the scenes where the Asian stripper/hooker and the black security guard are killed: they’re dismembered for easy disposal in the desert, but the only glimmer of moral concern is about the death of the security guard - the girl, apparently, isn’t worthy of consideration - because she’s just an Asian hooker.
I’m not overly sensitive, but this is one movie I’d quite happily have erased from my brain.
I’m still watching it (I tend to watch movies in segments) and while I still like it, it’s starting to wear thin as it’s becoming “detestable for detestability’s sake” as you put it and I’m starting to irrationaly loathe Christian Slater on a visceral level for his character, not to mention Jeremy Piven.
And to clarify, the only reason they (Daniel Stern’s character only, actually) cared more about the guard than the stripper was because he might (and eventually is discovered to) have kids. They were just as freaked out by her death as his but, I guess, as a stripper they never expected her to have any children.
I just finished it and have no idea if I like it or not and would probably need to watch it again to be sure but that’s not going to happen again any time soon, if ever. It was almost like a bad episode of *Seinfeld *and a Nightmare on Elm Street movie were hybridized and then crossbred with Happy Gilmore.
What a fucked-up movie. Yet strangely appealing as well.
Eh. I actually saw it in the theaters (hey, I really like Christian Slater as an actor, and this was a free ‘advance screening’), and felt like they could have called it “Very Bad Movie” as truth-in-advertising.
The problem I had with it is that none of the characters were at all likeable. They were all horrible people- whiny and annoying and intensely self-centered- and so, when bad things happened to them, there wasn’t any sort of impact. Hell, only two of them- Christian Slater and the guy who killed the hooker in the first place- were awful enough that one could cheer when bad things happened to them. The rest were just idiots, doing idiotic things.
That’s not true at all. They were all extremely freaked out about the Asian hooker.
The difference between the hooker and the security guard is that the hooker’s death was an accident. They’re freaked out and desperately trying to figure a way out of the situation.
The security guard, on the other hand, was deliberately murdered. That’s the point where they’ve gone from being stupid men in the middle of a bad situation to being murderers. Two entirely different moral situations.
I agree with the above posters about the lack of sympathetic characters in the movie. I adore violent black comedies (“Man Bites Dog,” anyone?), but I found this film particularly devoid of any redeeming qualities. It played like a bunch of violent non-sequitors strung together. By the end, I just didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything in the movie.
Can anyone remember the original version of this movie? Very Bad Things was essentially a remake of Stag which came out in 1997. But I remember when I watched Stag I was thinking it was a remake of a previous one. The first movie I saw with the plot of “a bunch of guys at a bachelor party accidentally kill a stripper and panic” was, I believe, some HBO movie back in the early 90’s.
Yeah, hence my Seinfeld/Elm Street comparison. A long list of violence against totally unlikable characters. The Happy Gilmore was thrown in there just because it was just unbearably goofy at times. I have to admit to liking the ending though. Diaz’s character was just as bad as Slater’s but even less likeable.
I enjoyed/hated that movie. By the end of it, you’re laughing at the most inappropriate things that aren’t funny, but are. The movie was very good at what it aimed to do, which is make me feel like an insensitive asshole.
“Very Bad Movie” is right. Despite having a good cast (and I loved seeing porn star Kobe Tai cast as the stripper… until her horrible death), it was very uncomfortable to watch, and not funny either.
That movie depressed the hell out of me. I can’t remember exactly what it was but there was something I think I found really woman-hating in it, more than the usual woman hating. I think it had to do with some things they said after the stripper was dead. There was something about it that was really creepy, beyond what’s a given for the story.
The only part I liked in the movie was the veiled Heather’s reference. Christian Slater is trying to set up the wife’s “suicide”, and somebody says “Have you done this before?”
I love Jeremy Piven and Jon Favreau, but Cameron Diaz would have made me dislike it even if it had been a great movie.
I found it appalling and depressing as hell, and my sense of humor is as black and twisted as it gets. It was gruesome, and both the characters and jokes sucked. It had no redeeming values at all. And this is coming from a guy who has no qualms laughing about real life horrible things.
I also thought it simply wasn’t funny. They forgot to add actual humor to the film. That’s sort of a basic ingredient to a black comedy. I wasn’t disturbed or offended or anything, but it was advertised as a dark comedy, and I expected to see stuff that might make me laugh. It’s like they completely forgot to write funny scenes.
Shock comedy can work, of course–look at South Park, or There’s Something About Mary, or a zillion other examples–but only if it’s done with a discernible human sensibility behind it.
On Seinfeld, the show’s writers let us “in on the joke”; they were mocking the characters just as we were. The problem with Very Bad Things was that the filmmakers quite clearly expected us to like those people, to think they were admirable and cool. The film was nauseating because of what was behind the camera, not what was on-screen.
Hey, I liked Very Bad Things, but not for its greatness as a movie. I’m a huge John Favreau fan, and also a fan of Christian Slater and Jeremy Piven, so it was pretty much a given that I would like it. And the OP did mention that he loved black comedies, so it seemed like an appropriate recommendation. It’s definitely a movie worth seeing for a fan of black comedies.
I hope you felt it was worth the time you spent watching it. I’ve only seen it once, but I particularly enjoyed Cameron Diaz freaking out on the wedding day in her dress, and was appalled – in a good way – by the final scene before credits. Talk about a comeuppance.
The movie Stag was mentioned in this thread. I liked that movie way more than Very Bad Things, but I don’t think they’re similar at all, except for being set at a bachelor party that goes terribly wrong. VBT went for shock humor. There was no humor at all in Stag; it was a drama through and through. I’m pretty sure it was a Showtime movie, not HBO, in particular because a Showtime-stable actor (Hal Sparks, from Talk Soup fame) was in it. Stag was, to me, the cinematic equivalent of a page turner.
In writing this post, I just noticed a parallel in two Cameron Diaz movies. Very Bad Things was about as good (or bad) as The Sweetest Thing. Where the former was about men and violence, the latter was about women and sex. Both were in-your-face shocking, and both were single viewing “I’m glad I saw it, but once was enough” type fare.