Sundance ’13: Hell Baby

To this day, French is still more widely spoken in New Orleans than people realize.  Unfortunately, an expecting married couple is not fluent.  If they were, they might have picked up on the neighborhood’s macabre names for the fixer-upper they just purchased.  They soon learn just how grossly they overpaid in Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon’s Hell Baby, which was a Park City at Midnight selection during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

Vanessa is pregnant, so we know what that means.  As soon as she and Jack move into the House of Blood, she starts to act like Signourney Weaver in Ghostbusters.  Not yet panicking, Jack takes her to see her psychiatrist, who is brutally murdered and crucified shortly thereafter.  This is certainly a suspicious turn of events, but Jack is preoccupied by the house’s supernatural box stacking, a desiccated old lady who will not stay dead, and F’Resnel, the friendly derelict crashing in their crawlspace.  Help, dubious as it might be, is on the way.  Vanessa’s Wiccan sister Marjorie is determined to perform a cleansing ritual and the Vatican has dispatched two investigators.

Veterans of MTV’s The State, Garant & Lennon recently exposed a bit of the Hollywood system’s sausage-making in their bestseller How to Write Movies for Fun & Profit, so they might be doing some short-term indie-genre penance.  While Hell Baby primarily goes for dumb gory laughs and is hardly shy about returning to the gag-well over and over again, it is safe to assume it is funnier, smarter, and more aesthetically rewarding than the latest Wayans’ horror “spoof,” sight unseen.

Indeed, Hell Baby’s comedy scatter gun is loaded with blood, vomit, nudity (both the hot and gross varieties) and the violent deaths of a fair number of major characters.  Still, Garant & Lennon find clever ways to poke fun at genre conventions, such as the practice of compulsively startling the protagonists.

As hapless Jack, Rob Corddry is very funny venting and whining.  He was also a joy to work with, according to Hell Baby’s impish Sundance junket send-up.  Garant & Lennon are strictly shticky as the Italian priests, but Keegan Michael Key has some amusing moments as the ever present F’Resnel.  However, Riki Lindhome probably deserves the most credit for being a good sport during her scenes as Marjorie, which must have been chilly, even in New Orleans.

Almost entirely shot in NOLA, Hell Baby’s demonic story might not sound like the best advertisement for the city, but Garant & Lennon compensate with some big time Po’ Boy love.  Hearing a bit more from the local music scene would have been even better, but so be it.  Its broad comedy hits the target more often than it falls flat and the wild exorcism scene should satisfy horror fans.  Sure to find a theatrical afterlife given the names attached, Hell Baby delivered what midnight patrons expect at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The Foul-Mouthed Operatives of Operation: Endgame

Those cloak-and-dagger types are so villainous. They always want to eliminate America’s mortal foes. Of course, that just won’t do under the new Obama administration. It is time to reward our enemies and punish our allies, which leaves a cabal of old school assassins out in the cold in Fouad Mikati’s Obama-era spy spoof Operation: Endgame (trailer here), now available on DVD.

It is inauguration day, but something is definitely amiss in the underground bunker shared by Alpha and Omega, two rival black ops agencies deliberately established to counter each other—a scheme that makes sense only in Endgame’s paranoid world. Still, it supplies a decent set-up for some rude but admittedly funny office place humor. In fact, the first half hour zings along quite nicely as the explicit, politically incorrect insults fly back and forth between the assassins.

Unfortunately, it is blindingly obvious Mikati considers anyone who is not a lifetime subscriber to Mother Jones an unredeemable psychopath. Naturally, all matter of evil skullduggery is ascribed to Bush and Cheney, while the film wildly exaggerates the popularity of the incoming President, even though buyers’ remorse was by then already setting in.

The McGuffin kicking things off is botched operation to blow-up the warehouse that held all the evidence against the outgoing administration, conveniently centralized in one location. When it goes sour, it somehow ignites a death struggle between the Alpha and Omega factions. While both teams derive their codenames from tarot cards you can tell Alpha is evil because their ranks include an African-American Republican and a Southern girl who attended a mega-church. Subtly thy name is not Mikati (nor that of screenwriters Sam Levinson and Brian Watanabe). By contrast, Omega is a somewhat likeable collection of drunks, the very hot “High Priestess,” and the new guy who got tagged with “The Fool” on his rough first day on the job.

As Alpha and Omega go at each others’ throats they must improvise weaponry from common office supplies, leading to a few more grisly laughs. Indeed, Endgame could have been quite entertaining if it was not so intent on grinding its ideological axe. Rob Corddry (formerly of the Daily Show) proves to be a master of foul-mouthed insult humor as the DTing “Chariot.” Bob Odenkirk also deadpans his way to some decent laughs as “Emperor.”

Looking pretty scary, Ellen Barkin chews the scenery rather shamelessly as “Empress.” However, Maggie Q is indeed quite attractive as “High Priestess,” while also bringing some legitimate action movie cred to the proceedings. Unfortunately, Zach Galifianakis is largely wasted as the anti-social “Hermit.”

A truly squandered opportunity, Endgame potentially could have been a very funny espionage movie send-up (albeit darkly so). While Corddry and Maggie Q give the film a boast of energy whenever they appear on screen (for very different reasons), it ultimately sabotages itself with the constant halting distractions of its contemptuous political score settling. As a result, the cynical Endgame already feels dated. A real coulda-shoulda film, it releases on DVD today.