How could a movie featuring a character named "Corned Beef" not be a cult classic? Maybe it's because I hadn't heard of a movie with a character named Corned Beef (or, for that matter, as I later learned in the end credits, characters like Ma'er and Reverend Steve and Legless Eunice), because it was only available at a (great) little video store in the East Village in Manhattan. Despite my ignorance of the title, or what it was really about or what was in it, the premise looked promising, perhaps in a vein of Cannibal the Musical! with a more wacky religious twist (and "based on the Broadway musical" didn't hurt its chances). But boy oh boy, is this a false advertising for a (rightfully) obscure indie! The movie is kind of like what The Holy Mountain might be if Jodorowsky had a hundredth of the budget to work with, and wasn't Jodorowsky per-say but Jack Smith (on his lessor days, not Fierce Creatures), with a chunk of Ed Wood stuck in his cranium. And, oddly enough, it's a young woman directing it.
Bottom line, it's a bad movie, one that only gets a rating that isn't an undeniable failure (i.e. a zero if I could give it one, which I would to a few choice films in existence) because of a little bit of cheesy-movie promise early on in the film. There's rancid special effects, a wretchedly overwrought voice-over, and the threat of aliens by way of a Jesus connection. Sounds like prime stuff. But it isn't. It turns very quickly into a mess that almost gives the term pretentious a bad makeover. It's so amateurish on all fronts that it's almost a wonder it got any kind of screening or release at all let alone the right to have a copy of it sitting in the Cult section of the video store. It's shot on grainy 16mm, which wouldn't be so bad except that save for the They Live rip-off TV moments of characters reading crazy sci-fi gibberish it's shot poorly and with the sound so out of sync we don't know whether it's intended or just a flub from the lab that didn't get fixed. Even the music, which should be poppy and upbeat, is the pits.
But throwing into the lot of disappointment from the technical standpoint, the actors look like bums and throwaways that Hammer uses without the *proper* artistic intent. If she wants to try for some kind of weird avant-garde piece out of the underground film movement of the early 60s, then she needs better control of a stance on where to go with the material. From an abstract or surreal standpoint Pussbucket meanders around some stupid (bleep) story of some scientist following the clues of some strange disturbances while Judas and Corned Beef (if those are the two guys, the ones with the hats) are visited by a Monty Python Holy Grail God figure who tells them to get lots of puss, and without much of a semblance of talent or poetry to the proceedings. Whatever Hammer wants to get across with a ten-to-fifteen minute sequence of the guys whipping some girl in a faux S&M scene leaves on indifferent, not feeling either way of like or hate. It's sophomoric BS to the Nth degree.
Or, it is, to quote There Will Be Blood for a moment, the Bastard in a Basket of allegorical "comedies" about aliens and religion. Don't let the title, the premise, or the character descriptions fool you! 1.5/10
