*Editors Note: The following piece is a review for a show that is rated TV-MA for mature. In order to help our readers decide whether to watch the movie, this review contains some content of explicit nature. Here also is a trigger warning as sexual violence is among topics discussed.*
The spring semester is reaching an end, and as a result Bluffton students are likely busier than ever. However, sometimes taking a break is a good idea, and so students may find themselves interested in watching Kitao Sakurai’s “Bad Trip,” which started streaming on Netflix March 26, 2020.
The film is a sort of hybrid hidden camera prank show and road trip comedy movie. It stars Eric Andre under the identity of “Chris Carey,” a car washer from West Grove, Florida who happens to run into his high school crush, Maria Li (Michaela Conlin), but manages to get his jumpsuit vacuumed off before he can talk to her, leading to him hiding in the car he’s cleaning and Maria leaving before he can ask her out. Chris calls his friend Bud Malone (Lil Rel Howery), a computer store employee, to hang out and tell him about the event, but soon after Bud’s convict sister Trina (Tiffany Hadish) starts causing him trouble at the store. The two swear that in a year, they’ll be going on big adventures. A year later, Chris runs into Maria again, and learns she runs an art gallery in Manhattan. Chris and Bud decide that this is their “big adventure,” and plan a road trip to New York. However, the two make the mistake of stealing Trina’s car while she’s in prison. When she escapes and finds out, she sets out to find them and kill them in revenge.
The film follows a standard road trip plot structure, with Chris and Bud stopping places along the way and getting into trouble. The film’s TV-MA rating is due to how vulgar and explicit some of these gags can be, such as Chris getting his hand caught in a blender, the two mistaking bags of drugs for breath mints, or the two getting their genitalia stuck in a Chinese finger trap. Another set of gags relies on the audience being familiar with the 2004 film “White Chicks.” The film definitely uses shock humor to its fullest, though some gags might be a bit much for some audiences; at one point, Chris is raped by a gorilla (very obviously another actor in a suit) after he sneaks into its enclosure, and early on in the film he mentions his high school nickname was “Retard Chris.” That said, the audience for this movie is very obviously meant to be for fans of Eric Andre, and this sort of shock comedy is, for the most part, par the course for “The Eric Andre Show.”
Particularly praiseworthy are performances of the main cast. Andre, Howery, Hadish, and Conlin all manage to maintain character in every scene they’re in, and they do convince you they are playing these characters in a film rather than being constantly reminded that they’re actors playing practical jokes. While the plot is nothing brand new, it serves as the vehicle for the film’s comedy rather well. There are even some rather simple character arcs in regards to Chris and Bud, though again these aren’t anything new for the genre. The film focuses on comedy and the comedy succeeds, for the most part. The film runs for an hour and twenty-four minutes, making it relatively short and more fast-paced, which I feel works in the movie’s favor.
My only real negatives for the film are a few of the gags fell flat and that Conlin’s character was underutilized. As previously mentioned, there’s a sequence where Andre’s character gets raped by a gorilla; beyond the shock value it seems a bit too far even by the movie’s standards, and does raise some ethical questions about staging a gorilla rape for an unsuspecting audience (I am aware of the absurdity of that sentence). Conlin’s character takes a bit of a backseat to Andre, Hadish, and Howery’s. While Hadish’s screen time is primarily her harassing pedestrians for information about her car, she still is a constant presence throughout the film; Conlin’s character only shows up in the cold open, after the opening credits, about midway through the film during a dream sequence, and at the climax. While this does work for the narrative set by the film, a few scenes of her setting up her gallery in some sorts of practical comedy bits would likely have fit into the film, though on the other hand it may have split the focus of the film too much instead.
Overall, I thought “Bad Trip” was a very good comedy film, if not very deep. It sets out to create laughs with absurd, vulgar and raunchy jokes, and succeeds at that goal. The hidden camera format leaves the visuals slightly crusty and the audio of bystanders somewhat muted, but the former is a minor issue and the latter can be solved by turning on subtitles. Fans of “The Eric Andre Show” especially should try to watch this at home, time permitting.
“Bad Trip” is currently streaming on Netflix.
