Both these movies crawled out of the primordial ooze of their creators' minds and slouched into the Sundance Film Festival last year. Luckily for the filmmakers, Robert Redford, swell guy that he is, passed on setting fire to all the existing prints, leaving these movies free to wander into the Elephant's Graveyard Of Unendurable Independent Films....Netflix.
Let's start with Antibirth, a "whoa-what-the-hell' horror film that features no less than two Independent Film duchesses, Natasha Lyonne and Chloe Sevigny. And no doubt the result of a search that must have rivaled Indiana Jones' quest for the Grail, this movie also dredges up that 80's Manic Pixie, Meg Tilly, now gray of hair but forever elfin.
Lyonne plays a fairly worthless drug 'n booze slut scraping a few bucks together as a motel maid. She and Sevigny hang out in Lyonne's lakeside hovel left to her by her late father, where Sevigny mildly worries about her friend's massive drug inhalation. What's worse, one of Lyonne's all night semi-comatose evenings has rendered her pregnant with no memory of sex involved (similar to to the genesis of Michael Jackson's children)......not just any pregnancy, but a full David Cronenberg body-fluid bacchanal, with a 3rd trimester belly bloat, teeth loosening out, skin rubberizing and pus dripping out of blistering wounds. Yum. Tilly shows up as an Army vet who may know the source of Lyonne's condition.....but who the hell cares?
Some time after 90 painful minutes of Lyonne alternately hitting the bong or peeling off her skin, the film lurches into its spectacularly nutso windup. Years ago, the last few minutes alone would have guaranteed it a spot on the midnight movie circuit, a worthy substitute to use when the 'Rocky Horror' prints got too chewed up to make it through the projector. But in this streaming day and age, you don't even have to leave your house to watch a full-grown whatsit crawl out of Lyonne's abused vagina.
Yoga Hosers (2016) continues the plummeting part of Kevin Smith's bungee jump career. We still fondly remember the once-upon-a-time in independent films when Smith ruled that world with "Clerks", "Chasing Amy", "Dogma" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back." But his last few years of flailing around, vomiting up misbegotten films watchable only by his immediate family......it's tortuous to see. Right now, Smith's wandering around in the same wilderness that M.Night Shyamalan was exiled into, turning into a reviled caricature of himself, cranking out desperately weird movies that look like warped versions of his better work.
Still, we remain optimistic about Smith, since Shyamalan put a reign on his overpowering ego and came roaring back with trim little nasties like "The Visit" and his current success, "Split". Smith may yet surprise us by hunkering down and crafting another smashingly funny character piece. But first he'll have to get stuff like "Yoga Hosers" completely out of his system.....with this movie, he's not so much Kevin Smith anymore......he's more like a half-assed, modern day Ed Wood Jr. and this atrocity is his very own "Plan 9 From Outer Space."
We cringe at attempting to describe "Yoga Hosers", other than it involves Smith's daughter, Harley Quinn Smith and Johnny Depp's daughter, Lily Rose Depp (a genuine find) as two Canadian slacker convenience store clerks. They end up battling....oh dear Lord......little Nazi sausage-men (Bratzis) who run around screaming 'Wunderbar' while lethally sodomizing their victims. Enough with that, we can't go on.
Smith was never much of a film maker, accumulating only enough craft to point the camera in the right direction. So making a stupid, lumpy story like this take flight was way, way beyond his skill set. It would take a supremely talented visualist with a sharp eye and a satirical mind to ever make a demented piece like "Yoga Hosers" work. Under Smith's lazy, absent-minded direction, the film lies there like a traffic accident victim waiting for the paramedics to show up.
In watching these two lunatic asylum escapee films back to back, BQ duplicated a 42nd Street Grindhouse experience far better than that "Grindhouse" epic concocted by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. They went to the trouble of deliberately creasing and streaking the images like raggedly 35mm prints. But for a true Grindhouse experience, you can't just imitate bad movies......you need real live, unintentionally awful cinematic abortions. And "Afterbirth" and "Yoga Hosers" beautifully filled the bill. No stars ( 0!!) for either of them.
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