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@Filmhouse, Edinburgh Tue 21 Jun and Cineworld, Edinburgh Sat 25 Jun 2016

Part of Edinburgh International Film Festival

Kevin Smith/ USA/ 2016/ 88 mins

We critics are scum.  Pond life.  Bottom feeders without the evolutionary drive to haul ourselves from the murk and create something ourselves.  Kevin Smith knows this for certain, he’s pontificated on it.  Then he makes another dreadful film, which the movie press attacks like zombies.  Film, attack, film, attack like a celluloid Ouroboros.  If this carried on long enough, future societies will come to believe this cycle is necessary for the sun to rise in the morning.  Allegedly, he’s mellowed a bit, dismissing the slaughtering his latest has received with a shrug, and ‘it’s not for the critics’. Perhaps knowing he’s in the enviable position of an inbuilt fan base he can afford to be more blasé.

Tusk, Smith’s previous effort, was a horror rarely birthed from a previously fairly-respected filmmaker.    Having its Genesis in a stoned bet on his ‘Smodcast’, it was the sorry tale of a man kidnapped by a lunatic and surgically transformed into a walrus.  In the hands of someone like a Lynch or a Gilliam,  this could have been something like a Kafka fever dream after a heavy night on the cheese.  Instead it was utterly charmless, inept and disgraceful.  It also featured Johnny Depp‘s worst-ever performance (imagine!) as a borderline racist Québécois private detective, and Smith and Depp’s daughters, Harley Quinn Smith and Lily-Rose Depp in a cameo as two surly, irritating store clerks.

Now the offspring have their own movie!  And Depp’s back!  In a display of nepotism not seen since the Bush family wormed their way into American politics, Coleen M and Coleen C (the junior Smith and Depp) find themselves under attack first from the murderous attentions of two Satanic classmates, and then from an army of cloned Nazi bratwurst soldiers with sauerkraut for blood.  If you thought Tusk‘s premise was stupid, you’re in for a treat.

Smith has stated publicly that he no longer makes films for an audience; merely for himself.  It shows.  While it’s undoubtedly a tremendous wheeze for Smith indulging his daughter and whatever stoner muse he’s following at the moment, the films he’s producing are practically unwatchable, shoddy and most importantly, as amusing as an Ebola diagnosis.  He was never a great technical director, but Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma had heart, wit, and something approaching insight.  Some of the critical disdain he’s received lately is surely down to at least a little heartbreak from some of his former champions.

Yoga Hosers is rammed together with no thought to plot or pacing, and the humour amounts to pointing out that Canadians talk funny, and that kids nowadays are buried in their phones.  When the principle villain reveals that his principle motivation is to take revenge on the critics who mocked his sculpture we can throw up our hands and declare satire officially dead.

Unfortunately, this is the second in a True North trilogy so there’s one more to go.  And the snake will likely eat its tail again.