"Strip away the morality, strip away the ethics, and we're left with a 105 pound problem. 105 pounds that has to be moved from point A to point B." (Christian Slater as Boyd).
Boyd is an estate agent. He is also a psychopath. Fittingly, given his recent incarceration for violence, Slater is landed the plum role. However, it turns out to be merely an extension of the nutcase he played in Heathers many moons ago. Only not half as good.
Very Bad Things is part of a trio (the other two being The Opposite of Sex and Your Friends and Neighbours) of very nasty American independent movies coming out in the next month or so. Like its contemporaries it's memorable and scabrous.
The tale concerns a trip to Las Vegas for the boys. Kyle Fisher, Favreau (of Swingers fame), is getting wed to snotty ex-sorority girl Laura (Diaz), but before he takes the plunge Boyd has organised some drugs and frolics in seamy Las Vegas.
Accompanied by brothers Adam (Daniel Stern) and Michael (Jeremy Piven) and mute-like Charles (Leland Orser), the big boys' entertainment is abruptly curtailed. Michael, high on coke, has accidentally embedded an Asian (played by real-life porn star Kobe Tai, a.k.a. Carla Scott) prostitute's head to a coat-hook in the bathroom. This is a truly gruesome scene that is interspersed quite cleverly with the revolting sight of two wrestlers on the TV. Noticeably, Berg's direction lingers very uncomfortably on her naked corpse.
The boys panic and before you can say "blood bath", Boyd misuses a corkscrew on a hotel security guard, leaving him wailing like a pig, before, inevitably, slaughtering him. He duly announces: "Surrender is no longer an option."
This kicks-off a lot of histrionic yelling and a burial scene reminiscent of Shallow Grave - shopping for equipment, decapitation and dismemberment. Aiming for humour, these scenes flop laugh-wise. Left in the hands of Tarantino or the Coen brothers, these sequences may have succeeded, but in Very Bad Things there is far too much screaming going on. The Coens would have tempered the chaos and brutality with pathos or a hint of humanity. Director Berg aims hard for "cool", but only achieves bad imitation.
After the horror of Vegas, the utterly charmless set of businessmen return to their suburban homes and go swiftly mad. What ensues is a series of events reminiscent of the classic Ladykillers, interspersed with the occasional witty line. Diaz, in particular, gets some fine dialogue: "The scent of cheap hotel's whore's sex" and "No one is going to rob me of the wedding I've waited 27 years to have." Slater also gets a couple of good scenes where he takes corporate business logic to an insane limit: "I'm a lighthouse, I never go dark."
Ultimately, Very Bad Things is disjointed, mildly irritating, far more violent than the pilloried and much finer Natural Born Killers, contains obnoxious characters and receives a rather good finale that it doesn't really deserve. A film that illustrates just how clever the likes Tarantino, John Dahl, The Coens and David Lynch really are.
Ben Walsh
