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I didn't set out to
watch Evil Bong because I thought it would be good, but I was
hoping it would be the kind of bad I could get into. You know,
Bride of the Monster, Battlefield Earth, bad like that.
I remember seeing a copy of it on a shelf at a Blockbuster and
thinking, Jesus that looks awful. There's Tommy Chong mugging over
an image of a weird bong with a face, psychedelic colors and pot-leaf
lettering to let you know this is a stoner movie, just in case the
title Evil Bong left any doubt. How can something like that
be anywhere close to good? Or even watchable? I suppose it could
have been a lot of things: a sly and knowing satire of stoner
comedy, a parody of franchise horror, or possibly a movie so
incredibly inept that the embarrassing dialogue, painful line
readings and laughable staging would make it a fun ninety minutes.
No, turns out it's just
stupid. It's “bad-bad”, not “good-bad”. Just incompetent
enough to be dull, insulting, and lazy, but not to the extent that
you shake your head in disbelief. What happens in Evil Bong is all
too believable, because it's no stretch to imagine a production
company throwing together a cynical, boring piece of shit with the
intention of cashing in on that lucrative
too-baked-to-give-a-shit-about-what-I'm-watching market.
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Here's a sketch of the
story: Nerdy college student rents a room with three stoner room
mates. One of the room mates buys a bong online from somebody in New
Orleans. The bong arrives, the stoners smoke out, and one by one
they disappear into an alternate dimension that looks like a cheap
strip club, populated by dwarves, strippers, and random characters
from other Charles Band movies (the Gingerdead Man shows up for a
second, and I think the lead from the Trancers series makes an
appearance) A couple of the stoners are bitten by vampire strippers,
but it's never mentioned again afterwards and has no bearing on the
story. Meanwhile, the evil bong grows stronger from having fed on
their souls or something, and develops both a face and a phoney
Creole accent. The nerdy student and his girlfriend are the last to
be sent to the interdimensional strip club once they figure out
what's going on, and that's when Tommy Chong walks in as the bong's
previous owner. He fails to kill it with a hammer and a chainsaw, so
he takes a hit off it and goes to the strip club and blah blah they
leave an opening for a sequel (two of them, actually).
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I only have a passing
familiarity with the work of Charles Band, but I see that Evil
Bong is one of his. He's kind of a next-generation Roger Corman,
responsible for a lot of the cheap, schlocky stuff that used to
litter the horror and sci-fi sections of my local video store. While
Corman achieved a touch of respectability with his loose Poe
adaptations back in the sixties, Band has produced almost nothing but
dreck, except for two loose adaptations of Lovecraft, Re-Animater
and From Beyond, which he executive produced. I don't have to
have seen most of it to know it's bad; I saw Mausoleum (which
is actually good-bad now that I think of it—there's a part where a
woman's boobs turn into demons and chew through a guy's chest, a scene that gets a nod here) and
Robot Jox, so after Evil Bong, what more proof do I
need? I'm not knocking the guy, he's in the movie business to make
money, but, like Corman, he churns out some serious garbage as a result
(Irrelevant side note: The best thing I've ever seen of Corman's is
Death Race 2000, and the worst is Creature From The Haunted
Sea).
The sad thing is seeing
Tommy Chong in this. Not surprising, just sad, in the way it's
always sad to see a performer decades past his initial fame trying to capitalize on tired schtick. I was never a big
fan of the Cheech and Chong phenomena, even when I used to get ripped
on a daily basis. Anyone over the age of ten who finds them
unironically hilarious needs anticoagulants to prevent another
stroke. They were sporadically funny, at best, but they occupy a space in the hearts
of at least three generations of stoners, a demographic with famously low standards in everything but plant strains. From what I can see, stoner humor consists
mostly of “Dude, those guys are baked!” and “Check it
out, they've got the munchies! 'Cause they're baked!” Sometimes
it hits the mark; Robert DeNiro spacing off and fumbling with a
phone in Jackie Brown is funny because it's fucking true, that's pretty much what it's like to be stoned, and the portrayal is not a
flattering one because it mocks how completely unfocused and bungled
a person is while under the influence. That's one of the reasons I
liked The Pineapple Express so much. It's shockingly honest
about what it's like to live the life of a chronic pot user, from
Seth Rogan's character admitting that he only hangs out with his
dealer because he's his dealer, not because he actually likes him, to
taking stock of his situation and admitting to himself that all of
the bad decisions he makes, he makes while high. Can you picture
Cheech and Chong being that insightful in their heyday?
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