2 out of 5

Directed by: Ryan Nicholson

You know, god help me, I almost gave this three stars because the last twenty minutes or so – when things finally find a balance between over-gore, obnoxiousness, camp humor, semi-scripting and genre-died nudity – are actually really good.  And, yes, that’s part of my two star rating, but also because a noted all-around kudo: Plotdigger films’ Ryan Nicholson has focused on the ‘extreme’ corner of the horror world, stemming from Cannibal Holocausts and birthing, in the modern age, VHS tributes like August Underground, and with ‘Gutterballs,’ Nicholson applied that mentality to a rape/revenge setup, filtered through an incredible 80s duh-ed collar-popped tongue-in-cheek ethos.  It’s not out to please or impress beyond a select viewing group, and the movie nails exactly what (I think) it’s going for, and in a technically impressive fashion.  All its excess is intended; all its cheesiness and offensiveness intended.  And what allows it to be a step above the likes of trashy flicks like Murder-Set-Pieces is that it doesn’t feel like Nicholson wanted to do anything beyond have, ahem, “fun,” i.e. there’s no eye-rolling point (insert violent pun there) stuffed into the snuff.

What makes it still bad is that, overall, it’s simply not very good.  There’s a grody short film in here, bit stretched to a bit over 90 minutes it drags, and annoys.  Not to mention the over-arching puzzle of extended rape sequences and how they factor into our film-going / -making psyche, but maybe more on that in a second.

Gutterballs sets its visual aesthetic from the first frames of neon titles and 80s hair-metal notes like Loverboy.  It also makes its Canadian-ness clear with an abundance of long vowel pronunciations and eh?s.  …And soon enough it sets its crass tongue firmly in cheek when a bowling team made of pink-shirt wearing frat boys starts giggling, saying ‘fuck’ a lot, and referring to bitches and faggots as much as possible.  The commitment to making these characters as unlikable as possible is admirable, but the joke becomes unbearable literally a few minutes in.  Our ‘hero’ team – pink-shirts’ rivals – enters, and they’re another round of stereotypes, with punk bandanas and Cindy Lauper hair and a black guy with an comb in his hair.  And a pre-op transsexual, for some reason.  This round of characters might be slightly less reprehensible, but they’re still idiots, and not a lot of fun to listen to or watch.

Soon, a girl in a skirt bends over and the movie goes unrated.  Later, she’ll be viciously raped by the pink-shirts, which sets us on the trajectory for the revenge we know is coming… 40 or 50 ‘fuck’ and giggle-filled slow minutes later.

Now, I say ‘vicious’ because the act is what it is.  But in horror the line between sex and violence is often blurred, and in films like ‘Gutterballs’ generally even more so, to the point of sexualizing things like forcibly jamming a bowling ball pin into a girl.  …But… Nicholson doesn’t quite do that, and I’d almost argue that there’s “fair play” in this department, with a fair amount of penises exposed, the muscle guy going shirtless just ’cause he has muscles, and our main perpetrator’s comeuppance not just a violent kill, but a tit-for-tat one.  Please don’t get me wrong: We’re still ogling boobs while reprehensible shit is going on; a women’s lib movie this is not.  I just mean to note that its another department where Ryan’s contributions to this genre seem to stand – if ever so slightly – apart from its peers.

The day after the attack, bowling leagues meet up again, are locked in the alley, and are getting offed by the creatively costumed ‘BBK,’ who keeps track of his kills in the scoreboard.  The lead up to the all-out climax has a couple murders which surprise in their own ways, but it’s still not until that last section that we get into Dead Alive insanity and the characters stop with the annoyingness long enough to actually deliver an ending to the movie, with maybe a couple extra details you weren’t expecting.

Did I actually see the balls-out version of the movie with the extra porn and gore?  I don’t know.  Will I watch more Nicholson?  I’m not sure.  The interviews I’ve read with him make him sound a lot less pretentious than M-S-P’s Nick Palumbo, and maybe a bit more in tune with the nature of his work than Toe Tag’s Fred Vogel, but I’m still not quite sure I hear the awareness I secretly wish was motivating this extremely outre products.

But watching his other films might be the only way I can make up my mind on that, and though twenty minutes into Gutterballs I wouldn’t have thought so, making it through the whole flick… Well, I’m not against doing so.  Yay?