If you’ve got a good title you’re halfway there, and “The Greasy Strangler” certainly has — well, it’s a title, anyway. Descriptive, too; before seeing a minute of the film, we already know about half the storyline.
“The Greasy Strangler” is bonkers, and designed to be an instant cult item, which raises the question of whether you can design a movie to be cult. I think not, and that’s one of the problems with this unflaggingly energetic journey into the weird.
In the first of the story’s unlikely realities, we meet a father and son who conduct guided walking tours of great disco landmarks. Not that this wouldn’t be an awesome tour, but it’s the first indication that things will be different here.
The second is that dear old Dad, known as Big Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels), is constantly yammering on about how he prefers his food greasy. The hapless son Brayden (Sky Elobar), reminded at every turn about what a loser he is, keeps piling the grease on — coffee is not exempt from the demand — but it’s never enough.
Even when Brayden finds a woman, Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo), who apparently finds him attractive, Ronnie has to step in and mess everything up. That’s what he does.
You may have guessed already that Big Ronnie might be the greasy strangler, a serial killer terrorizing the city. We’re not left in the dark very long about that, as Ronnie is sometimes seen covered in grease himself (in disturbing anatomical detail, presumably with prosthetics), having recently committed murder while covered in grease.
This outline would make the film odd. But for filmmaker Jim Hosking, that’s not enough. The characters must talk and act in a highly stylized way, a bizarre form of discourse that plays a little like “Napoleon Dynamite” with a hard-R rating.
In the early going, this results in some quite funny exchanges, especially whenever people are misunderstanding each other or father and son are arguing about which one is the bigger b.s. artist (this is a favorite phrase, in spelled out form).
It grows pretty tiresome as an operating procedure, however. The characters are moronic, and frequently naked, or close to it. You will wish they weren’t.
But that’s part of the culty attack. It’s forced, though, which takes the bite out of it. The only really cult-worthy bits are the premise itself and the utterly bizarre presence of Michael St. Michaels, whoever and whatever he is. The actor is 68 years old. For him, this movie is some kind of crazy breakthrough.
+m+m “The Greasy Strangler”
A movie that wants too much to be a cult classic, about a bizarro father-and-son duo
Rating: Not rated; probably R for nudity, language, subject matter
Opening: Friday, Oct. 14 at The Grand Illusion
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