Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Tommy Darwin, Marni Russo, Neil Foley, Tess O'Flaherty, Tammi Mortem, Chloe Mortem, Ben Gel, Lawrence Harvey
Intro:
… an affable drunken boofhead of a movie, staggering onto the screen and delighting audiences primed for 90 minutes of garish, socially irresponsible, utterly irredeemable entertainment.
The bad taste, trashy horror comedy is a subgenre that seems to have died in the arse in recent years. Whereas once we had a noxious deluge of flicks like The Toxic Avenger (1984), Street Trash (1987), Bad Taste (1987), Braindead (1992) and Body Melt (1993), numbers have dropped right off lately. Sure, every now and then we get a Father’s Day (2011) or a Greasy Strangler (2016), but these feel like outliers, throwbacks to a golden age of repugnancy.
Happily, writer/director/Trasharama festival founder, Dick Dale, has seen fit to redress this imbalance with the homegrown ode to cinematic atrocity, Ripspreader. The good news? It’s a bloody good time!
Ribspreader is the story of Bryan Burns (Tommy Darwin), a former cigarette spokesmodel who has just buried his mum after she died of lung cancer. Ol’ mate Bryan is feeling pretty bloody sorry for himself, and no one seems to care, certainly not his “girlfriend”, the disinterested sex worker Gypsy Lee (Marni Russo). So, when Sigmund (an evil ethereal cigarette puppet thingamajig) starts talking to him and giving him murderous ideas, Bryan is primed to listen. Maybe he should take revenge on smokers, maybe he should extract their lungs to make a macabre smoking jacket… yeah, that sounds like a belter of an idea!
What kind of movie is Ripspreader? Well, it opens with a sex worker giving herself a coat hanger abortion in a seedy back alley, turning around to face a stranger and offering to deliver unto him a skillful gobby for twenty bucks, before she’s brutally murdered.
Taken even remotely seriously, this sort of material could be deeply unpleasant, but Dale’s micro-budget opus has one thing on its goon-addled mind: fun.
At every given moment, the path of most piss-takery is gleefully steamrolled down; with Murder City (aka Adelaide) portrayed as a violent hellscape brimming with drunken gronks, roaming gangs, and ubiquitous serial killers. Punk gigs turn into executions and mosh pit overdoses, hot goth girls talk in rhyme and harvest horny Johns for their adrenal glands, and little old ladies mutilate one another for the pick of the street trash.
This is cheerfully silly, over-the-top, and frequently, very visually inventive stuff.
It’s not all beer and blowjobs, mind you. The film’s lead – Tommy Darwin – is a profoundly odd casting choice. He certainly looks the part, with sad eyes and long, straggly hair, but isn’t always the most dynamic screen presence. Additionally, the film loses some puff in its second half, after opening with anarchic energy. Dale also introduces about half a dozen too many subplots, something that no doubt came about due to the seven(ish) year production time, as it was made in dribs and drabs.
Still, it feels churlish to complain about the rough edges in a film that positively delights in them (and then covers them with intestines).
Ribspreader is an affable drunken boofhead of a movie, staggering onto the screen and delighting audiences primed for 90 minutes of garish, socially irresponsible, utterly irredeemable entertainment. It’s cheap, it’s nasty and it’ll no doubt disgust the sort of people who confuse being offended with having a personality, but for audiences primed to have a good time, it’ll go down like a foaming schooner of piss.
