30 Days of Hate Day Four: Stan Helsing

The Movie: Stan Helsing
Director: Bo Zenga
Starring: Steve Howey, Diora Baird, Kenan Thompson, Desi Lydic and Leslie Nielsen.
Netflix Predicted Score: 1.0 stars

Look, parody is hard. I know this. Not everyone is an inherently funny person, and not everyone can write decent jokes. But even more than that, it takes a special breed of comedian to be able to create an effective work of parody. Bo Zenga, the writer/director of Stan Helsing, is clearly not of this breed. What Zenga has here isn't even really a parody of anything in particular, so much as a scatterbrained collection of fart jokes, sluts, ill-advised musical numbers, and almost shockingly unfunny send-ups of popular movie monsters. Who needs a focused concept when you can just cram together as many scenes of violent pooping, flailing vampire tits, and non-sequitur gay porn gags as 90 minutes will allow, right? Not to mention that Zenga somehow, some way, manages to completely shit upon the comedic talents of the legendary Leslie Nielsen, who all throughout looks mostly confused and upset at where he's ended up at this stage of his career. I went in expecting something pretty awful in Stan Helsing, and what I got was something excruciatingly awful.

The Premise: Is there one? Again, this movie has no idea what it is it's trying to parody exactly, so all I was able to glean is that the title character, who is played by Steve Howey (and looks a little like a genetic splice-together of Josh Duhamel and Floyd from True Romance), is a video store clerk with a shitty attitude about, well, everything. He, along with his best buddy (Kenan Thompson, who looks depressingly happy to be in a movie, any movie), his ex-girlfriend (a pleasantly busty Diora Baird) and some random stripper/massage therapist/nymphomaniac (Desi Lydic) have plans to go to a purportedly epic Halloween party, but before they can do so, Stan has to drop off some video tapes at the home of his boss' mother. That detour takes the foursome into some terrible, terrible realm where they find themselves constantly accosted by the laziest send-ups of popular movie monsters you could possibly imagine. Somewhere in there Stan learns that he is the direct descendant of legendary monster killer Van Helsing, and that he is tasked with saving a small town plagued by the aforementioned monsters.

How Does All of That Go? Confusingly! Poorly! Unfunnily! The pace and style of this movie approximates the worst episode of Family Guy ever written. It's all random asides and out-of-nowhere sight-gags that tie together with nothing in particular. Good parodies usually find a way to make their zanier gags fit with the silly story they're trying to tell, not to mention feature some vague approximation of comedic timing. Stan Helsing? None of that. Zenga throws a national cemetery's worth of horror movie references and half-jokes at the audience without much mind as to whether any of it will stick or not. He features send-ups of no less than a dozen or so movie monsters, yet can't seem to find a single joke to tell about any of them that's remotely funny. Freddy Krueger? He wears a glove with lipstick and toothbrushes attached to it, and wears a Flavor Flav clock for, like, no reason. Jason? He wears an entire hockey uniform, and kills people with...a hockey stick. Pinhead? His skull is pincushioned with novelty pens. And why the shit is Michael Myers wearing a yarmulke? Sigh.

Zenga incorporates all these miserable monsters in the most random way possible. Stan and friends just wander from place to place, getting periodically accosted by various killers and ghouls, only stopping for periodic opportunities to have Lydic make some kind of brazen reference to lapdances or hand jobs, or to engage in bouts of inexplicable karaoke. There's a barely-developed running joke about Stan being some kind of karaoke freak, but despite featuring no less than three bafflingly long musical numbers, Zenga can't manage to wring a single, identifiable joke out of any of them. When the foursome engage in a less-than-rousing rendition of “Ring of Fire” to a room full of people whose town once burned down in a fire, that joke doesn't even become apparent until the song is over, leaving us with nearly two minutes of them just singing Johnny Cash with no measure of humor to be found. As for the rest? Well, this clip pretty much says it all.
 
 
Is There ANYTHING Funny In This Movie? There is a scene where Lydic's raging slut character falls down a drain pipe and Stan is holding onto her by her ankles for dear life. While she's dangling there, a mouse wanders up her skirt and starts...erm, how can I put this gently...tickling her goddamn vagina. After she, Stan and the rest fall down the drain into the sewer, one of them sees the mouse and screams, threatening to kill it. Lydic screams, “NO! He's my...friend...” I won't lie. I sort of chuckled.

Where Does Leslie Nielsen Fit Into All of This? Oh poor, decrepit, confused-looking Leslie Nielsen. Such a legend of parodic comedy, and yet what is Zenga's sole use for him here? Shoving him into a shitty drag costume and forcing him to play a salty, ancient bar waitress. Nielsen gets a few half-assed wisecracks in, but he delivers them like he doesn't even quite know what he's saying or why he's saying it. Granted, if I were him and had even a scarce awareness of what my career had been up to this point, I might not give a flying shit, either. Just watch the clip and see what these people have done to the poor man.
 
 
What Kind of Terrible Is This Movie? Eye-rollingly, funny bone-snappingly terrible. I've talked a lot of shit about filmmakers like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer in the past. You know, those guys who make parody movie dog shit like Epic Movie and Vampires Suck. I'm saying it here right now: Bo Zenga makes these dudes look like fucking geniuses by comparison. Stan Helsing is a crowning achievement in anti-comedy, not simply content to suck on its own merits, but also dragging the storied comedy career of a true legend through the muck in the process. To Bo Zenga, I say the following:

Tomorrow: Asylum