You Might As Well Live (2009)

Male nudity (hey, there's no gratuitous female nudity for once!), bondage, sex toys, guns, mental institutions, drugs, transvestites, insanity, catatonia, and crime are topics you don't want to see, don't watch it. And you're probably not going to show it to your kids.The lighting is a bit questionable, but the acting is not! I find this one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. It is black humour at very high level. Clearly many rank it very low. I bought the DVD as a remainder when Blockbuster went bankrupt. Every time I watch it, I love it!

Since watching this movie last evening I've been trying to decide what audience it was made for. All I can come up with was 30-40-something and stoned. I'm sorry, the humour was so sophomoric, simple, and just plain un-funny it's border-line unbearable. I shamefully resisted the urge to shut it off after the first scene, and in hindsight I'd be a better person if I had. The reason I stuck it out is that the acting, with a few notable exceptions, is actually not terrible. Gotta feel for an actor who has this atrocity on their resume.

Not only is this film disgusting, offensive and vulgar, but it's also just plain dumb. I mean c'mon, isn't a naked nerd getting called a pedophile and chased by an equally pedophilic clown just a little bit juvenile? I don't mean to sound like a prude or a snob, but penis jokes and sex jokes stopped being funny when I was in the ninth grade. Mental hospitals and lazy stereotypes of the many patients within one just aren't funny to me. Neither is a man having a sexual fetish for paralyzed and disabled people. Have I missed something here? The one and only scene I really enjoyed in this film was the one where a psychologist and a patient have an air hockey match and the orderlies are placing bets. Julian Richings is an excellent actor, I don't know why on earth he'd sign up to be in a film like this one. With its Troma style, its lame jokes and its cheap digital footage that looks like Toronto stock footage shots, 'You Might As Well Live' is I think one of the worst things I've seen in quite some time.

Really great Canadian films are hard to find. They're so thinly spread that most get lost or eclipsed by the sea of American output. On the same token, truly solid, 'funny from beginning to end' comedies are just as rare, at least for my specifically demented taste, ad mark my words, you've got to have one sick puppy of a sense of humour to appreciate You Might As Well Live, a comedy so dark it feels like it has origins in some obscure back alley improv skit fashioned by the strangest people in the class. If that sounds like a glowing compliment fpr a film to get, then keep reading, this may just be the animal for you (I'm looking at all of you YLYL's lurking my feed). This one plays like a mix of John Waters and MadTV on crack. It concerns a childlike loser named Robert R. Mutt (Josh Peace), a hapless schmuck who never seems to be able to do anything right. His childhood idol, major league baseball star Clinton Manitoba (Michael Madsen, riotous) appears to him, claiming he needs three things to succeed in life: A girl, some money and a championship ring. And so he sets out on a deranged quest in his scuzzy rural town, beset by all kinds of drug dealers, vagrants, oddballs and deviants, including rabid Fred Steinke (a maniacal Stephen Mchattie) who aims to have Robert chemically castrated. It's seriously off the map, queasy humour that hits some notes so off key that laughs turn sour upon leaving you as you realize you shouldn't find it funny. But hell, I did. So if you're down, give it a go, and remember: Robert R. Mutt is NOT A douchebag!!