Film Review: Chop (2010)
Chop (2010)
Directed by: Trent Haaga
Written by: Adam Minarovich, Trent Haaga
Review by: Mike Snoonian
Imagine if every terrible deed you’ve gotten away with in life all came back to bite you in the ass on the same night. A whole lifetime’s worth of gross misconduct and all around douche-baggery cashes in its chips and collects full payment in one fell swoop. That’s the premise behind Chop, a comedic tale of revenge that made its North American premiere Saturday night at the Boston Underground Film Festival.
Director Trent Hagga is a veteran of low-budget filmmaking, holding just about every conceivable position while cutting his teeth at Troma films, handling writing duties on Citizen Toxie: Toxic Avenger IV and Dead Girl, but Chop marks his first foray behind the camera. Haaga breaks out the no-budget, short schedule tricks he’s learned on other sets with a fast moving and engaging comic film that transcends budget and technical limitations.
Lance Reed (Will Keenan, aka Tromeo in Tromeo and Juliet) finds himself stranded in the middle of the road after his car breaks down. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but his decision to hop in to a stranger’s truck and hitch a ride back to town ends up kick starting a downward spiral into his own personal hell. To pass the time, our stranger has a question for Lance: if he had to choose between his wife and his brother, whose life would he save? After Lance answers he’d save his wife, he’s asked a follow up question: has he ever been shot by a tranquilizer gun before?
Before Lance knows it, he’s waking up in a warehouse, his brother gagged and tied in front of him, and his wife screaming in terror over the phone. The stranger has put together an elaborate plan as payback for a past unnamed offense. If Lance doesn’t bury an axe in his brother’s skull, the stranger will kill his wife. One dead brother later, the Stranger reveals Lance’s wife and brother were having hot monkey sex on a weekly basis. Lance’s implicit orders are to go home and kiss his wife “knowing that your brother dropped hot loads down her throat” and carry on like nothing happened or else the brother’s body, which is covered in Lance’s DNA, will resurface.
Poor, twitchy Lance goes all of three weeks without hinting to his wife that he knows about the affair. That sets off a chain of events that costs Lance his wife, his sanity, and various body parts. Lance just doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, and out pour a litany of confessions involving amputee meth dealers, ten dollar hookers that are well versed in blackmail and extortion and a leather daddy ZZ Top impersonator with a Conrad Bain fetish. All the while he racks his brain trying to figure out where he knew his captor from, hoping that whatever he did was horrible, like “killed you grandmother and shit in her mouth” levels of awful. Every time he confesses a different sin, he ends up losing another part of his body, setting him on the fast track to be little more than a head attached to a stump.
Fans of Korean revenge cinema are going to find a lot to love about Chop as it plays like a low budget Shaun of the Dead style riff on films like Oldboy and Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance. He keeps the pace zipping along and allows his characters to riff off one another for some of the most hilarious exchanges you’ll find in cinema. After Lance tries to pass off missing a whole hand as a second lawn mower mishap in two days, the officers investigating his brother’s death dryly inquire “Sir, do you even know how to operate a lawn mower?” Keenan excels in the comic role of the not quite ex-junkie. He’s all nervous tics and bug-eyed hysteria as his life crumbles around him. Equally up to task is Timothy Muskatell as The Stranger. He conveys the kind of unadulterated happiness at wrecking Lance’s life usually reserved for small children that get golden retriever puppies for Christmas. His continued hints at a dark, life changing encounter between the two keep the viewer engaged. Better still, the payoff when it’s revealed what Lance did to the Stranger is just ingenious and spot on with the tone of the film.
Chop is the antidote to those of us that find too much of modern horror dour and humorless. It’s high time that the artless sub-genre of torture porn got a good natured spoofing. Chop delivers a fast paced and downright hilarious lampooning of the kind of horror that, until recently, seemed to be all the rage. Fans of old school Troma films that appreciate a film that can make them laugh just as easily as gross them out should be all over Chop.
Chop had its North American premiere this past weekend at the Boston Underground Film Festival. Mike Snoonian writes the horror blog AllThingsHorrorOnline.net and curates a monthly horror series at the Somerville Theater in Boston, MA.
