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| Courtesy of SmodCo Films |
I still maintain Jersey Girl and Zack and Miri Make a Porno are solid, surprisingly poignant films that get a bad rap, but it was the latter’s failure at the box office that led Smith down his present, unfortunate career path. He tried to go the workmanlike director route with the action comedy Cop Out, but his combative relationship with star Bruce Willis – combined with the movie’s mediocre quality and financial success – sent him fleeing back to the safety of indie films.
However, rather than use this creative freedom to experiment with technique or invest his eccentric capital on powerful stories that needed help finding a voice, he has mostly been content to bask in his wake-and-bake persona and make baffling home movies with his podcast cohosts and celebrity buddies. Admittedly, Red State was an intriguing idea poorly executed (essentially every paranoid stoner conspiracy theory tossed together in a blender), and even Tusk (a horror comedy about a mad scientist who turns his captive houseguest into a walrus) sounds audacious in theory.
That’s why I gave Smith’s latest, Yoga Hosers, a chance when it recently popped up on Netflix. But now that I have, I refuse to even call it a real movie. It’s more like a dare. For 87 minutes, I sat slack-jawed, unable to stop watching the inanity unfolding in front of me. I just kept repeating, over and over again, “Somebody actually made this. And people gave him a lot of money to do it. And talented actors agreed to be in it.”
I don’t even know where to begin with the plot, which is remarkably convoluted for such a short movie. The titular “yoga hosers” are Colleen Collette (Lily Rose-Depp, daughter of Johnny) and Collene McKenzie (Harley Quinn Smith, daughter of Kevin), collectively known to their Canadian town as “the Colleens.” They’re typical 15-year-old girls, who love their smart phones and hate their part-time jobs at a convenience store owned by Colleen C.’s dad (Tony Hale).
However, when a Canadian Nazi (Ralph Garman, Smith’s Hollywood Babble-On cohost) awakens from his cryogenic sleep and sics his “bratzis” (as in, miniature sausage-Nazi hybrids – all played by Smith, hidden under layers of makeup) on the town, the Colleens join forces with private investigator Guy Lapointe (Johnny Depp, in yet another role involving prosthetics and a silly accent, clearly doing his daughter favor) to take down the villain.
I promise this is not some fever dream I had over the weekend; it’s something you can actually watch on Netflix right now. But I wouldn’t, considering it looks like a badly-shot episode of a single-cam sitcom on ABC Family and it’s crammed with an endless stream of celebrity cameos that feel desperate instead of funny.
A more cynical viewer might even consider this ill-advised endeavor the height of nepotism, considering it’s basically two rich celebrities getting together to turn their kids into movie stars. But I’d argue that’s excessively harsh, since the one thing I actually liked were the performances from Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith. If you’re able to get past the horrifically bad movie unfolding around them, they’re pretty darn good.
Perhaps most baffling of all, the final third of Yoga Hosers is devoted to Garman showing off a series of celebrity impressions he utilizes every week during Hollywood Babble-On. That might be a great in-joke for regular listeners of the podcast, but it will likely prove impenetrable to non-fans who stumble across the movie. Granted, it’s that “what the heck am I watching?” nature of the flick that kept me from bailing out. Every time I got close to turning off the television, something bizarre or mildly amusing would happen that drew me back in for a few minutes.
Still, the movie’s trainwreck quality isn’t enough to recommend it to general audiences. Smith’s die-hard fans and connoisseurs of trash cinema should find enough to keep them interested, but everyone else should stay far away.
Yoga Hosers is rated PG-13 for crude humor, sexual references, comic violence and brief drug material. (Now streaming on Netflix.)
Grade: D-
A more cynical viewer might even consider this ill-advised endeavor the height of nepotism, considering it’s basically two rich celebrities getting together to turn their kids into movie stars. But I’d argue that’s excessively harsh, since the one thing I actually liked were the performances from Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith. If you’re able to get past the horrifically bad movie unfolding around them, they’re pretty darn good.
Perhaps most baffling of all, the final third of Yoga Hosers is devoted to Garman showing off a series of celebrity impressions he utilizes every week during Hollywood Babble-On. That might be a great in-joke for regular listeners of the podcast, but it will likely prove impenetrable to non-fans who stumble across the movie. Granted, it’s that “what the heck am I watching?” nature of the flick that kept me from bailing out. Every time I got close to turning off the television, something bizarre or mildly amusing would happen that drew me back in for a few minutes.
Still, the movie’s trainwreck quality isn’t enough to recommend it to general audiences. Smith’s die-hard fans and connoisseurs of trash cinema should find enough to keep them interested, but everyone else should stay far away.
Yoga Hosers is rated PG-13 for crude humor, sexual references, comic violence and brief drug material. (Now streaming on Netflix.)
Grade: D-
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