Greasy is the Word

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Learnin' earned from years of watching bad movies for a living - and a hobby! - has taught me that setting out to make a bad movie doesn't work. Look no further than the Sharknado series, which wore out its welcome after the first fifteen minutes and then had the gall (Or is that gull? Am I just thinking about The Shallows now?) to keep going for several sequels. I don't care if it's single-handedly keeping Tara Reid's mortgage in the green so I don't have to - there are only so many sharks that can fall out of the sky before you say enough is enough is enough is enough. 

A great bad movie should be a happy accident - instead of ye olde adage about not letting them see you sweat a great bad movie should be nothing but sweat, buckets and buckets of sweat, dripping off of the screen. It should turn the movie screen into a goddamned slip-n-slide it's so wet with flop-sweat. We should walk out of the theater soggy, a little bit insane, and totally sickeningly satisfied.

Which is why it's so astonishing that The Greasy Strangler, a movie reaching its flabby skin-flutes for the stars, succeeds so thoroughly. You walk out of it wet alright, but with saturated-fats caked in your face-holes. Grease, I speak of grease - so very much grease! More grease than you'd get at a Danny Zuko bukakke party. To say that The Greasy Strangler lives up to its title is akin to calling Donald Trump just a little turd - the scope of it, the unfathomable absurdity of the understatement, is brain-busting. It is bigger than you and than me - picture the parting of the Red Sea, but with puke, and you're getting somewhere.

That is to say I liked this cinematic psychotic episode very much, and I positively goggled at its ability to be both terrible and brilliant, terribly brilliant, all at once. It is, as they say, an acquired taste. There will be gagging. I could imagine a lot of people eating their own eyeballs before continuing on past the five-minute point. I mean, fuck, five minutes might even be too much for some of you. This is not a dare. Is is not a threat. It is a promise. A wet, greasy one. Stay insane, bullshit artists.

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