Amy's Robot

Midgets vs. Mascots

Last night I watched the weirdest movie I've seen so far this year at one of the last screenings of the Tribeca Film Festival. It's titled Midgets vs. Mascots, and plays like an especially surreal competitive reality show--more offensive than "Little People, Big World", but mostly less shocking than the really nasty scenes from the first few episodes of "Rock of Love Bus".

The premise of the movie is this: a successful little person, who during his career transitioned from mascot to porn star, dies, and leaves his estate to whichever team wins of a series of 30 challenges. One team is midgets. One team is mascots. Both teams end up getting really porny.

As you would guess, the humor centers on fart jokes, sex jokes, porn jokes, puke jokes, and poop jokes, and slurs based on race, gender, body size, penis size, and horniness. It's quantity, not quality. Too many jokes depended on shock value and nothing else, so sometimes it was pretty jaw-dropping and funny, but often it was unimaginative and not that funny. But it won third place in the film festival's Audience Awards! People love schlock.

But the reality show style was absolutely perfect, complete with trash-talking scenes on each of the teams' tour buses, the competing coaches secretly getting busy, and escalating gross-out depravity. Some of the challenges were inspired, including Drinking a Gallon of Milk, Making a Movie Trailer in 30 Minutes, Tetherball, and Getting Someone to Punch You in the Face After the Fewest Insults.

Plus the cast. In addition to the primary cast members Bunny, Gator, Spartan Man, and Taco, we've got Gary Coleman as the lead little person, the little actor from In Bruges, Jason "Jay" Mewes, and Scottie Pippin.

The movie website has some NSFW clips, some interviews that discuss Gary Coleman's sort of sweet rants about the movie and a claim that he threatened to kill the cast, and audience comments such as "Love the racial offensiveness" and "I liked the booger dialogue."

categories: Movies, Robot-on-the-Spot
posted by amy at 3:49 PM | #