Tusk
Directed by Kevin Smith
USA 2014
PLOT
Wallace and Teddy are two friends who work together and run a podcast dedicated to gathering and telling the most absurd stories of popular news. One day, Wallace travels to Canada to investigate the story of a boy who, with his katana, amputated his leg. Once there, he discovers that the boy has died in the meantime. While waiting to return home, the young podcaster goes to a bar and finds an ad from an old sailor looking for company to share his tales and marine adventures. Curious, Wallace responds to the ad and goes to the address: there, he is welcomed by Howard Howe, a man who he will discover is far from the nostalgic sailor described in the ad.
THOUGHTS
Forget the Kevin Smith who rose to fame in the nineties with the cult *Clerks* and later gave life to the quirky character Silent Bob. The director here is a mature screenwriter who, fully aware of his journey, mixes genres and brings his visions to life.
The result is TUSK, the director’s second foray into horror following the excellent Red State. What initially seems like a grotesque and comical stylistic exercise in a Pulp fashion erupts in the second half into a frenzy of blood and flesh.
The elements are basic: a huge and magnificent isolated mansion, a lone man hiding a “mad doctor,” a man seeking adventure and a scoop, and a monster.
This formula has been proven since the days of Frankenstein and has stood the test of time, even becoming the foundation for recent films like The Human Centipede.
But Kevin Smith manages to go even further, empathizing with the viewer and setting the stage for the visual and visionary violence of the second half, the purely shocking aspect of body horror and the monster movie genre.
You will see the “poor” Wallace tortured, cut, and stitched up to be transformed into the human walrus that Howe obsessively mentions throughout the film.
His legs will be amputated, his tongue cut out, his arms stitched to his body, two enormous tusks implanted (made from his own bones), and covered with human skin sewn together.
This absurd frenzy builds to the point where the creature is revealed in all its horror.
Unlike other films that fail to fully develop the monster’s entrance, here we see it eat, swim, attack… until the desolate and bitter final scene.
A unique but successful film where irony, the surreal, and madness go hand in hand, managing to both move and shock at the same time.
TUSK, in its own way, is an extreme film, where everything is shown without compromise, where there are no clear heroes or villains but rather characters who all, in their way, hide shadows.
The cast also features Johnny Depp as the bumbling former inspector Guy La Pointe.
PANDEMONIUM MOMENT
Among the many impactful scenes, the one that struck me the most is when Howe throws the walrus into the water, intending to make it swim, and it finds the carcass of another hybrid at the bottom.
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