Oh my...Jesus! Was this made by lunatics because it actually made me shout out loud what everyone always says, it made me shout "What am I watching!?" So I'd heard something of a buzz about this movie lately and I thought I'd check it out for myself, well it did make me laugh a lot and it certainly had an atmosphere and characters that were genuinely grimy, nauseating, and all-round unpleasant to look at and listen to, the "Big Ronnie" character, who really for better or worse made this a worthwhile picture, was one of the most vile and disgusting slabs of sweet humanity ever committed to celluloid. He loved his food to be composed of more choking grease than food and he treated his poor infantile son like complete garbage, he was such an unrepentant asshole, but damn if he wasn't a sincere asshole! At points it really did have me laughing hard, like when the Indian guy keeps saying "potatoe" in that messed-up way, but then it had way overdone moments like when Big Ronnie and the fat chick keep chanting "Hooty-tootie disco cutie" like demented maniacs forever, which was just a level of idiocy that I find childish and beyond the pale and is really just too much for me to find funny. So anyway, pretty much this movie to me is...bad, and that's good as it's clearly an attempt at a so-bad-it's-good type picture, and it has its moments, but to me it was still totally charmless and just not very good. I'm not sure how much of the randomness was due to original intent and how much was because they were making it up as they went along. It's crude, offensive, shoddily put together, but it is called "The Greasy Strangler", and you don't pick up a movie with a title like that expecting Shakespeare. This is a movie based around shock value and campy stupid fun, and in those areas it succeeded, but that is a bit of a double-edged sword. While this is the kind of movie you can sit down with a group of friends and have a good laugh with, just be careful you don't lose a few of them in the process! Ignoring the intentionally low brow juvenile humour and offensive material, when it comes to the basic balance and pace this movie leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, its overall effect isn't terrible but it is lopsided and fails to live up to its full potential. Too much loony toilet humour, with the last twenty minutes in particular feeling so chaotic and patchy it feels like they're just wasting time to make up the length of the feature! So overall I think it's an unapologetically flawed mess of a movie with nothing really holding it together beyond shock value, titties, and gratuitous shots of old man ass. But you could still do worse believe it or not, and you can tell that the very brave actors were having some fun with it. I enjoyed it enough I guess, it was a decent effort, it felt very true to the spirit of the period of film making long passed that spat out such bizarre and grotesque splatter flicks, and it was nice to see that tried these days. It tries its best to genuinely offend the viewer and it succeeds as a general great big f**k you to conventional barriers of good taste and political correctness.
