Bad Trip
Directed by Kitao Sakurai
Running time: 1hr26 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Eric André and Lil Rel Howery star in Bad Trip
Humour based on disgust or outrage is one of the first types of humour we learn to perform, perhaps opening our mouths as a toddler to disclose chewed-up food, then screaming with laughter. In cinema, this kind of humour is called gross-out humour and filmmakers almost always marry the gross-out aspect to social shame for maximum impact. If you shit yourself in the woods and nobody is around to see it, did you really shit yourself?
Disgust plus shame equals gross-out comedy; it’s a time-honoured equation, and it’s funny because it’s not happening to us. Gross-out is one of the most humanising, instantly empathetic sub-genres of humour. If you want to make a film where your audience will care deeply about — say — whether the adult children of an elderly couple pay enough attention to their parents during an extended visit*, you need to master characterisation and all the infinite subtleties of interpersonal dynamics in order to create a compelling narrative. On the other hand, a film like Kitao Sakurai’s Bad Trip — a riotous, ribald hidden-camera comedy — can rely instead on the shortest of short cuts to human empathy, hot-wiring our ability to identify with the characters.
“Thank god that’s not me,” you think as Eric André takes a face-full of gorilla spunk at the zoo. We writhe as André pratfalls off a bar and explosively projectile vomits in a line-dancing bar in middle America. Who is he? He’s The Clown. We don’t really need much more backstory than that, although the movie does give him one, as a kind of horny Don Quixote, pursuing an elusive high-school crush across America. The always amiable Lil Rel Howery (Get Out) is his Sancho Panza, whose ex-con sister, played by Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip), channeling Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, is genuinely terrifying as she hunts down the hapless pair. But the plot is irrelevant. The appeal of the film is seeing talented comedians enact their stunts and set-pieces in front of unwitting members of the public, pushing the hidden camera format to its limits and revealing a lot of Americans to be surprisingly decent. Imagine if Frank Capra had directed Borat and thrown in a set-piece involving two penises caught in a finger-trap. That’s Bad Trip, baby!
BAD TRIP (2021) Written by Eric André, Dan Curry, Kitao Sakurai | Shot by Andrew Laboy | Edited by Sascha Stanton Craven, Matthew Kosinski, Caleb Swyers
* Yasujirō Ozu’s enduring masterpiece of humane profundity Tokyo Story is available to watch now on Prime if Bad Trip doesn’t sound like your kind of thing. Or, watch both!
