Nature Calls

While I didn't have high hopes for Nature Calls to begin with, it went above and beyond to prove me wrong. It was even worse than I ever could have imagined and, as per the summary of this review, is quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen.

I get that you can make a low brow comedy flick. In fact, I don't mind them. That's what I expected from this. But to call it a comedy would be a flat out lie. There was no redeeming humor in the film at all, not a single laugh. The plot and story were incoherent, the characters were undeveloped and horrible, the actors (as one critic put it) phoned it in, and the editing was atrocious. The entire thing made no sense - it wasn't even so bad it was good. It was just bad.

If you want a 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th opinion read any of the other critic reviews. Just whatever you do - do NOT watch this movie. I don't usually write reviews, but if I can't get my 90 minutes back at least I can save yours.

A truly bizarre film. It has the premise of a heart-warming family comedy, with a troop of little kids and an earnest scout master who wants to instil love of the outdoors in some sheltered suburbanites (with the expected undertone of weird US nationalist propaganda American films like this seem legally obligated to have). But while it more or less delivers the by the book plot and emotional beats you'd imagine such a film would have, it does so with constant swearing, lewd dialogue, and a slew of adult characters who seem to have wandered in from a National Lampoon movie. Even with this jarring hodgepodge, there were dramatic beats that were cheesy but would have been serviceable enough if they had done the absolutely bare minimum to develop the characters. Randy and Kirk are brothers but have no relationship and nothing whatsoever is offered to explain why Randy loves their father's scout mission so much while Kirk is not just indifferent, he hates the entire concept of nature. You expect some kind of backstory to eventually come up, but it never does, even when the pair have a serious scene together. There's nothing to invest in.

I don't understand who this movie is for or for whom it would even be appropriate. Overall it can only appeal to kids and stars five too many ten year-olds for teenagers to be interested, but it's from the perspective of the adults and full of adult jokes (not just rude, but rude and jaded in ways kids won't find funny). There's also a bunch of irreverent religious 'humour' coexisting with a weird conservative streak as if events were taking place simultaneously in a John Waters movie and in the land of Leave it to Beaver. It really is like two completely different scripts with wildly different sensibilities crashed into each other at high speed and somehow merged.

It's not totally joyless, I did actually laugh a bit, even if more often out of shock and confusion than at punchlines. The actors seem equally uncertain what kind of tone they should be going for, though they make an admirable attempt to give it energy and momentum. Two major characters carrying most of the emotional load of the story are mute for no adequately explained reason and this compounds the already profound issue of lack of character development. Patton Oswalt was just boring and flat and the only one who tries to play it as if it were that milquetoast family film throughout, while everyone else at least commits to the insanity level that seems necessary. He can't really act and he doesn't get to be funny so I don't know what the thinking was, all I know is he failed to carry this movie and there are three people who could have done better right there in the cast. I had to watch it through my fingers out of second hand embarrassment at times and I'm left wondering how on earth this happened.

This movie was so terrible that I told my brother that I would give him $1 for every minute he made it through. I had to watch it in 4 installments over 3 weeks because it was that terrible. I'm down $22.

There were parts of the movie that were just screaming. When I say screaming, I literally mean screaming about whatever subject popped into the actor's brain. There could have not been a script. I'm serious. If there was a script, I would be incredibly surprised. My other theory is they all did a ton of muscle relaxers and tried to act on them.

If you do decide that you want to watch this movie make sure you have your wife/husband/friend lock away all your knives, guns, razors, sharp items, rope, etc. Because it's that bad.

Save yourself some time and energy and read Youtube comments instead of watching this "movie".

Nature Calls (2012)

BOMB (out of 4)

Incredibly awful comedy has Boy Scout leader Randy (Patton Oswalt) kidnapping his brother's (Johnny Knoxville) adopted son and friends and taking them into the woods for a camping trip. Yes, that's pretty much the entire story. I've seen quite a few bad movies in my lifetime but it's pretty clear that it's hard to get a movie made today and get it released to something other than Youtube. I say that because for the life of me I can't see how this thing got financing and I really can't understand why some studio would actually buy it, try to release it and make money off of it. This here is without question one of the worst and most pathetic comedies I've seen in a very long time and it's really too bad considering the talented cast. I really couldn't understand where any of the comedy was supposed to be coming from because the screenplay doesn't have anything remotely funny or even that interesting. Yes, I get it, the Boy Scouts are falling apart and this Randy is just holding onto the past. That's fine but is this supposed to be funny? Is it funny seeing boys pee in the woods? Is it funny seeing the adopted son is from Africa? Is is supposed to be funny that the brother gets set on fire? The entire movie is just one big flop after another with bad jokes, a boring story and not a single interesting thing going on. Oswalt pretty much sleepwalks through the role and this is certainly the worst I've seen from him. Knoxville is just more annoying than anything else and Maura Tierney is just wasted. The late, great Patrice O'Neal is the only bit of energy but sadly he's not in the film enough to make it better. NATURE CALLS is a complete misfire that's certainly one of the worst films of the year.

Nature Calls is the last film I'd expect from Todd Rohal, who directed the eccentric mixed-bag that was Guatemalan Handshake and the hugely questionable but watchable Catechism Cataclysm, among a wide variety of short films in the nineties. Rohal's style seemed as if he would shy away from anything remotely in the same vein as Nature Calls, a farce centered around a boy scouts trip in the woods. I expected Rohal's next project to be quirky, but what I didn't expect it to be was conventional.

Just by his five short films and two feature films, I knew Rohal was something different in cinema. Whether or not I like his work is a different story, but I will always look forward to what the man has coming out simply because it's something I can't rationally expect. How many filmmakers can we say that out about? I know Steven Spielberg's next film will either be a big-budget adventure film or a serious-minded biopic, I know Kevin Smith's next film will be a human drama centered around hockey, I know Martin Scorsese will examine another cultural figure with a magnifying glass, and I know Tyler Perry will continue to humanize African Americans with another Madea movie or a drama totally in its own melodramatic league. I am completely unsure of what Rohal's next move will be after two extremely out there, independent films and one obscure comedy playing dress-up in mainstream clothes.

The plot concerns Randy (Patton Oswalt), a dedicated boy scout leader, who desperately wants to get children excited about learning the fundamentals of nature and how to survive in the deep wilderness. The problem is in the dawn of technology and commercial flashiness, children are not even remotely interested in what Randy has to say or do. When the kids would rather go to Randy's brother Kirk's home (Johnny Knoxville) to welcome home their new adopted son from Africa, Randy crashes the party and takes the kids for the trip of a lifetime in the woods. This leaves Kirk, his pal Gentry (Rob Riggle), and an angry parent (the late, great comedian Patrice O'Neal) to find Randy, while having Kirk's wife fend off a crowd of angry, nervous parents who want to find their children's whereabouts.

The only thing worse than witnessing a lukewarm or flat-out bad comedy is thinking about what that comedy could've been if things had went in a different direction. There is a scene in the movie that takes place after Kirk is injured very badly after being caught on fire. He requests the children build a stretcher out of materials they find in the woods. They come back a little while later having erected a life-size cross, akin to the one Jesus Christ was crucified on. When they tie Kirk to the cross, they drag him across the woods, bloody, badly cut, and screaming for mercy.

When watching this scene, I realized the true potential this could've had as a twisted, dark comedy with obscure humor and inane setups. All while Todd Rohal maintained his status as an enigmatic filmmaker. But for some baffling reason, Rohal decided to make a comedy that more-or-less tried to hard to mimic that of a foul-mouthed mainstream comedy and only succeeded in being gratuitously foul-mouthed and hinting it could've been destined for cult greatness.

The other downside to the film is that so much comedic talent here is wasted. Patton Oswalt, who has worked in great dark comedy films such as Big Fan and Young Adult, does about as much as he can with the thin material provided, Johnny Knoxville and Rob Riggle are mostly obnoxious bullies without ever being funny, and Patrice O'Neal is the only guy who can get a laugh but even this makes me think about the good films he could've been in if he hadn't died young.

It would appear Rohal wanted to make an independent comedy that dabbled into the mannerisms of a mainstream one but tried to simultaneously give off the impression of a sweet, simple farce that a studio couldn't make. This is a stretch, but it's a nice justification for now. Nature Calls, right down to its perfunctory title, is a wholly disappointing effort from a filmmaker who definitely has better material and ideas on his hands.

Starring: Patton Oswalt, Johnny Knoxville, Rob Riggle, and Patrice O'Neal. Directed by: Todd Rohal.