From the same guy who made the infinitely superior Gutterballs and the equally awful Live Feed, comes Hanger. Because wasn't the world clamoring for the story of a hookers botched abortion and the resulting murderous spawn.
Unfortunately, Hanger has all the same stupidity of Gutterballs and absolutely none of the charm or fun. The story is silly beyond belief, but that doesn't stop the script from explaining every corny detail in long, drawn out scenes of eye rolling dialog.
As the movie opens we've got a bunch of hookers, one of whom is pregnant, living in a run down hotel. Their pimp doesn't like the fact that the pregnant girl is costing him money so he decides to take care of things himself. In true Ryan Nicholoson fashion this is shown in very gory detail. The problem is that it's not in any way funny, nor is it making a statement. I could deal with a scene like this if there was something behind it that made it worth while, or even made it seem like the director was trying to say something worthwhile, but he's not, he just wants to show that he can do a special effects abortion.
Now then, the hooker dies and the baby gets thrown in the trash, only to be picked up a homeless mental. Fast forward 18 years and the mental homeless dude has raised the disfigured baby, apparently living in a tent in an ally all this time. Upon his 18th birthday the old guy passes the kid off to a former john of the hooker who believes he's the kids father. The father does a lot of talking about the situation, as if we're in the middle of a grand mystery and can't figure out this less than basic story on our own.
The dad apparently has connections at a recycling plant and gets the kid a job working with other mentals, misfits and what not. But his grander scheme is to use the kid to get to and kill the pimp, because every pimp who works out of a $5 motel in what looks like Fort Lee, NJ takes a master plan, spanning 18 years, to kill. Now, we saw the dad earlier in the film, and not only has he not appeared to age in 18 years, but he still drives the same truck. God, this is so awful. Not only is it awful, but it's fucking boring. There are some gory and silly kills, but not silly fun, just silly stupid.
The kid is put up with one of the other dudes who works at the plant, who of course is also a goofy, disfigured sort who just happens to have a porno featuring the kids dead mom. He also thinks hot dogs are what you get when you microwave poodles. Real funny shit here.
So the dad explains the master plan to the kid, how the best way to get to the pimp is to draw him out by killing his whores. Again, this is akin to sending Seal Team 6 in to rob a candy bar from a Bodega. Anyway, as soon as the dad explains his plan, he gets in his truck and wouldn't you know it, one of the pimps main hookers jumps in and starts talking about how she wants to help kill the pimp because, and I quote "He fucks every single one of those whores". It's like my dad always said, if you can't trust your pimp to be monogamous, who the hell can you trust? The scene doesn't really go anywhere other than to give us a good five minutes of the kind of top shelf acting you can only find in movies about botched abortions and the killer children of said botched abortions.
Next we go into the comedy portion of the movie as the freaks are working at the recycling plant, which appears to consist of one room full of dumpsters with various things in them. The budget for this movie is listed at $250,000, $200 of which I'm sure went into building this set. This scene is full of non sequitur jokes involved crabs, making tea out of used tampons, and a diaper fight, of course using loaded diapers. This might have actually been funny if this was what the entire movie was about, but as it is it just feels like the scene itself is one long non sequitur. It's interspersed with two other scenes, one featuring the dad and the pimp having a showdown that involves a hooker fingering what she admits is her unwashed vagina and rubbing the remnants all over dads face, and the other a scene involving the improbably hot boss of the recycling plant deciding to get on her desk and masturbate for no particular reason. Both scenes make liberal use of a squishing sound effect. Well, if you've got to have a calling card as a director, I guess the sounds of vagina squish is as good as any.
OK, now things get rather fascinating, on some disturbing level. The dad is tied up after having his face torched by the pimp. Then the hooker with the dirty cooch proceeds to rubs herself all over his torched up face and fart on him. At the same time, one of the mentals from the recycling plant drugs the other two guys, takes an entire bottle of Viagra and rapes them. But this is no simple rape, oh no. After doing the first guy, who decides to rape an open wound in the stomach of the partially aborted kid. This is...graphic. This is...I'm at a loss for words as to the point of this, the comedic intentions of this, the entire point of any of this. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit to laughing my ass off just now. Oh, and all of this is interspersed with the hot boss still doing a rather graphic softcore masturbation scene with a pen, that her father the foreman will later sniff.
From there it's more over the top shit, including a tampon being removed from the passed out boss and revenge for the rape by choking the rapist with poop. There's also some outstanding continuity as the dad, torched and beaten, wrapped in plastic and left for dead, wakes up and cuts his way out, then finds the hooker who farted all over him, still in the process of douching, which she said she was going to do as she left the room he was being tortured in. Then there's Russell, the dude Hanger lives with, an hour into the film saying "you can crash with me tonight", long after it's been established that they live together. The pimp telling the female boss "maybe I'll come back later and bang you again", despite the fact that he hasn't banged her once. Or the pimp throwing in a line at the end of the film about having just served 18 years in jail, which leaves the viewer to wonder exactly when in the past day he's collected all these hookers to work for him. I'd like to be amazed at a movie that cares this little about it's own story, but it's too god damn ridiculous to even start to think it ever cares about the story to begin with. So yeah.
OK, so what else? Well the movie is filled with sound effects. Like, there's constant train whistles and sounds of trucks and police cars, to give the illusion that everything is taking place somewhere other than an abandoned parking lot. It's incredibly distracting, but not nearly as distracting the music that plays during much of the dialog. It's like how in real movies, fight scenes are often augmented by a blistering soundtrack to heighten the scene. Well here the wondrous banter between characters is backed up by indiscernible and generic heavy rock. Unfortunately we can still hear the words.
This is a movie that you cross your fingers and pray it was meant to be this dumb, because otherwise the world just feels like a sadder place to live. The thing is, I've seen this guy make a good movie. Granted, the actors were roughly 1000 times better, and there was an actual set, but still. Everything about it was so insanely better than this piece of shit.
I'd suggest that this DVD is better served used as a coaster, but that belittles the work that goes into making coasters. In a movie filled with rape, abortions, open wounds, pooping, and tampon tea, the most offensive thing about it is the craftsmanship.
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