Grindhouse Weekly: FATHER’S DAY

This week we’re going to take a bit of a departure from our traditional grindhouse viewings and talk about a contemporary exploitation flick with Father’s Day.  This delightful piece of trash from Astron-6, a Canadian film collective, is one of the latest movies that attempts to recreate the glory days of exploitation cinema. We’ve seen quite a few of these coming out since Grindhouse, with other notable releases like Hobo with a Shotgun, Black Dynamite, The FP, and more recently, Manborg. When comparing Father’s Day to these films it lands somewhere near the top of the pile, but while it’s entertaining and at times funny, it often misses the mark.

The film is about a serial killer who targets fathers and brutally rapes them before gutting and consuming their organs.  The only people who can stop him are a motley crew of individuals led by Ahab (Adam Brooks), an eye patch wearing bad-ass.  Joining him in this quest to kill this psychopath is a priest (Matthew Kennedy), a gay prostitute (Conor Sweeney), and Ahab’s stripper sister (Amy Groening, niece of Simpsons creator Matt Groening).

The story starts off as a standard 80s style slasher, however as the film progresses everything becomes much more outlandish and supernatural.  Though it is a spoiler, it needs to be said that at one point the characters follow the killer into hell.  I didn’t necessarily have a problem with the ridiculousness of it all since it was done in a very tongue in cheek way and it’s clear from the onset that this movie isn’t going to take itself seriously.

This is the big problem I had with the film as a whole however.  In other parody films similar to this there’s always an overabundance of gore, which is to be expected.  Father’s Day took things entirely too far however, and the extremely graphic scenes of torture, rape, and murder caused the tone of the film to feel uneven and inconsistent.  At its core, this is supposed to be a spoof movie with stupid one liners and a lot of comedic elements, but the gore was simply too extreme to be considered funny. The filmmakers were certainly try to make the movie as tasteless as they could and they succeed, but watching a lunatic slice open his own penis just isn’t my cup of tea.

The film does however, do a decent job of recreating the 80s feel.  While there are some scenes that will pull you out of the illusion, it does a fair job of capturing the vibe.  Your standard traits are present like film degradation and a fantastic synth score, but there are a few added touches that enhance the experience as well.  At one point the movie stops and a commercial plays like you’re watching it on a local TV station. While this isn’t an entirely new concept, they really nailed it on the visuals and it proved to work quite well.

It’s also worth noting that this is a Troma release.  I say this because although I’ve seen dozens of Troma films over the years, this is by far the highest quality of all the Troma releases. Of course, Lloyd Kauffman has a cameo as well, playing God and the Devil.  If the upcoming Class of Nuke ’em High 4 is anything like this I’ll be a very happy camper.

If you’re into cheesy 80s horror you might get a kick out of Father’s Day, but if you don’t like campy piles of trash, then it’s best to steer clear of this one.  Out of all the modern grindhouse flicks coming out as of late, I still believe Black Dynamite is by far the best, so if you’re looking to ease into these types of movies and haven’t checked that one out yet, see that before committing to the onslaught of Father’s Day.