At the Empire Live filmfestival I have seen a movie that I will never forget, no matter how hard I’ll try: The Greasy Strangler. My friends really wanted to go, and I was hesitant, cause I already disliked the name, and I am the type of person that judges a book by its cover, unless people tell me I shouldn’t 😉 So in this case I went along with them, it was the last movie on Saturday evening, and the director was there for a Q&A and I love those.

The movie though, holy moly, it was so weird! Weird is not even the best way to describe it, cause it was more like: insane. To tell you what this flick is about is a challenge. So with some help from IMDB, I can tell that it is about a father and a son, that are guides on walking tours about disco music. Mind you, in this movie there is zero disco music. But they do tours, and then there is this hot woman on the tour that the son is trying to date.

He is trying really hard and he is doing a pretty good job, but then his father starts hitting on her too. And that is actually what the title of this blog refers to, cause the son notices what his dad is up to and warns him that he should not be a “smoothie”, meaning a smooth man. Now let me tell you, they are not the most attractive people in the world, and they eat the most disgusting things, mainly containing a lot of fat, grease, whatever you want to call it.

So at the same time in this flick, we see the father turning into this “greasy strangler” by night, meaning he wears a suit that makes him look like a pile of hardened grease, and he likes to kill people in the weirdest ways. Again, it is really a very, very disturbing movie, made by director Jim Hosking. It’s actually his debut as a director of a full length movie, and I am pretty sure he will have a big fanbase full of odd balls that live for these kinds of super crazy flicks.

I am not saying The Greasy Strangler is not good, cause as an art project or as a movie it is pretty cool, it is just not my thing. I am tough when it comes to laughs, and I do not prefer the bizarre when it’s like this. The movie actually reminded me of a friend back in my school for journalism days: Itam. He was an aspiring filmmaker and he made his pretty crazy/fun stepfather star in a movie in which grease and fat was the subject too. It was almost the same style and the same topic. Unfortunately I can’t find it online anymore, which might be because Itam is actually very serious about his journalism these days, but it was really cool and weird.

Anyway, I would never watch The Greasy Strangler ever again. I did like the honesty of the director during the Q&A, I liked how he was pretty humble, not arrogant at all. He reminded me of a guy I met in Los Angeles that had the same kind of attitude. And I think The Greasy Strangler is actually shot in LA too, so it is easy to connect the dots I suppose. Oh and I should also mention that I did fall asleep a few times during the movie, so I haven’t even seen it all! 😉