If you find yourself screening a Troma Entertainment film, you should know what you are getting into. The Production Company are responsible for countless films of gross out exploitation. Their independent releases include The Toxic Avenger (1984), Redneck Zombies (1987), Nightbeast (1982) and Mother’s Day (1980). Their name listed on a film’s movie poster can guarantee low budget horror, blood and gratuitous nudity all compacted into stories that generally play out more like ideas than flushed-out screenplays.
Their latest effort is Father’s Day, a film that will be as hard to review as it was to watch, a film that was a great time, but one we relish in privately as Father’s Day is hardly a film that we could overtly recommend.
The film is a goofy and violent romp about a psychopath called the Father’s Day Killer and the eye-patched Snake Plisskin wannabe (played with bravado by Adam Brooks) and the male prostitute Twink (Conor Sweeney) who try to hunt down the sick son-of-a-bitch.
Father’s Day has Troma trademarks all over the print with explicit scenes of gore, sex and violence all covered in tasty sauce of blood and maple syrup (yes, maple syrup). The four directors of the film (Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy and Conor Sweeney) credited as Astron-6 attempt to capture the popularity of the cult exploitation film Hobo with a Shotgun and surpass the Rutger Hauer film with its absurd over-the-top showcasing of some vile and audience isolating moments of pure cinematic depravity.
Having the World Premiere at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, the attending audience fuelled the electric atmosphere and cheered, laughed and groaned in all the intended moments and even the male on male rape scenes were accepted by a group of ticket holders that clearly understood the cesspool they were wading into.
Father’s Day eventually finds itself falling into the similar category as The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film as being a film that we ultimately enjoyed and yet have to conscious of the persons to whom we recommend the film. Father’s Day is not for everyone. Hell, it ain’t even for most. But for those that enjoy the morbid exploitation of a Troma film, Father’s Day is one of the best.
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