After Dark

High School (Director: John Stalberg): I’m happy when a genre fest­ival like Toronto After Dark decides to colour out­side the lines a bit and bring in some­thing that’s not spe­cific­ally a horror, science-fiction, or mar­tial arts film. Not that “stoner comedy” hasn’t become a genre unto itself, but some­times it’s good to reach the non-horror crowd. So I was excited to see High School, (some­what) fresh from its screen­ings at Sundance. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a dud.

When Henry, the smartest kid at his high school, decides to smoke a joint for the first time with his one­time child­hood pal Travis, he has no idea that fas­cist prin­cipal Gordon is about to intro­duce man­datory drug testing for all stu­dents, THE VERY NEXT DAY! When he finds out, he and stoner Travis decide that the only way to avoid failing the test is to make everyone at the whole school high. It’s an excel­lent coin­cid­ence that the school is having its extremely pop­ular bake sale, also THE VERY NEXT DAY! They just have to steal some very potent flakes of con­cen­trated THC from the most psycho pot dealer in the world, bake hun­dreds of brownies, and then switch them with the reg­ular brownies. No problem for the smartest kid in the school and his new friend. Along the way, there’ll also be some male bonding and Henry will win the girl of his dreams and still get to be valedictorian.

Maybe I’m just old. I know these films aren’t sup­posed to make any sense. And yet, this one rubbed me the wrong way almost from the begin­ning. Our bud­dies bore an uncanny resemb­lance to Michael Cera and Jonah Hill in Superbad, a film I liked quite a bit, des­pite the sim­il­arly unreal­istic plot and emo­tional bonding between two high school seniors going in dif­ferent dir­ec­tions. The dif­fer­ence is in the writing. Every attempt at relationship-building in the film felt com­pletely tacked on to the madcap action. I can almost see the writer cutting-and-pasting this stuff into the script in a late draft. And apart from Matt Bush as Henry, everyone else’s per­form­ance is wildly over-the-top, which is fine in the case of Michael Chiklis playing the evil prin­cipal, or Adrien Brody chewing the scenery as Psycho Ed the dealer. But I found the char­acter of Travis Breaux (get it, bro?) and the actor playing him (Sean Marquette) to be insuf­fer­ably smug. He rep­res­ents the self-satisfaction of this film, which thinks it’s being edgy but is just char­ging off in all directions.

I found the treat­ment of female char­ac­ters to be par­tic­u­larly poor, bor­dering on offensive. One of those is an Asian-American whose only func­tion in the film is to provide the film­makers a way to make repeated bad puns on her last name (Phuc, get it, bro?). The love object has pre­cisely one line, and a number of other women in the film exist only to be ogled, fondled or har­assed. This might have been okay in the 80s, but it feels dated and unfunny now.

Worst of all, for a stoner comedy, it actu­ally makes get­ting high look like the worst thing in the world. Slowing down the audio to make people’s voices sound weird to the stoned isn’t that funny the first time. It’s cer­tainly not funny the third or fourth time, either. Several char­ac­ters hal­lu­cinate and become para­noid after smoking pot, and one decides to ride his skate­board off a ramp into the cafet­eria on the next floor down, injuring him­self in the pro­cess. You might as well have had someone thinking they could fly and jumping off the roof.

There are some very good stoner com­edies out there (Harold and Kumar, for a start) so there isn’t any need to see bad ones, no matter how high you are. If this film was trying to be Superbad with weed, it just turned out to be super bad.

(5/10)

Tagged as: #afterdark10, stoners

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