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Very Bad Things

USA 1998

Reviewed by Xan Brooks

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

Five friends - Kyle, Robert, Charles and brothers Michael and Adam - go for a stag weekend before Kyle's wedding to Laura. In Las Vegas, Michael accidently kills Tina, a hooker. While attempting to cover up the crime, Robert kills a hotel security guard who blunders in and sees the body. The friends bury the corpses in the desert and return home.

Guilt and tensions begin to surface. Fraternal friction erupts between Michael and Adam. Michael accidentally kills Adam and becomes a nervous wreck. Meanwhile, Adam's widow Lois grows suspicious. Robert kills both Lois and Michael. Distraught, Kyle confesses all to Laura, but she insists the wedding must go ahead. At the ceremony Robert attacks Kyle but is himself attacked by Laura and then dies falling down some stairs. Laura orders Kyle to dispose of Charles, but both end up crippled in a car crash. Laura finds herself in charge of a warped family set-up consisting of Adam and Lois' children and the now disabled Kyle and Charles.

Review

Alongside 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag and the Farrelly brothers' There's Something about Mary, Very Bad Things is suggestive of an emerging trend, a 'new sadism' at work within left-of-centre US cinema. Directed at a lick by debut writer-director Peter Berg (an actor from The Last Seduction and CopLand), this scabrous little comedy comes on like some bastard progeny of the 80s Brat Pack movies. A bunch of sharp-suited young blokes get their kicks at a bachelor party. Then things go abruptly haywire and the movie detours into Treasure of the Sierra Madre country as the former buddies start clawing at each other like rats in a sack.

Crucial to the success or failure of Very Bad Things is the thin generic line it treads. Is Berg's film a black satire on male friendship and marriage etiquette or a comedy with a dubious subtext? Take those initial murders. The culprits are all white, cocksure and reasonably moneyed; their victims are Asian (the prostitute) and black (the hotel worker). Berg may be taking a subtle potshot at the rapacious white male here, but if so, the swipe is very, very subtle. No explicit racial point is made, yet one suspects we're being asked to laugh at these two unfortunates, who both expire in absurdist, comic fashion. Audience identification is always with the perpetrators. The hooker is "a mess... a 105-pound problem" to be disposed of and the security guard a threatening gate-crasher. This queasy set-up established, Berg's film improves dramatically, its impact heavily reliant on firecracker acting from Daniel Stern and Cameron Diaz. As Adam, the most conscience-pricked member of the group, Stern goes nuts in a most entertaining fashion, freaking out at a service station while his obnoxious kids shriek, "We want Whizzers!" in the minivan outside. When Stern exits the film, it's up to Diaz to perk things up. Taking the stock ballbreaker role she has played before to its logical conclusion, she mutates from petty nagger into the yarn's most ruthless and take-charge protagonist. Certainly Christian Slater's rakish Robert (an actor still perfecting his karaoke Jack Nicholson schtick) pales in comparison.

The trouble is that Berg doesn't seem sure how to draw matters to a close. Hence Very Bad Things goes from shrill to shriller to shrillest. As the body count mounts up the dark humour turns from noir to pitch. By the last quarter, the film flags until an audacious final coda sends it out with a last-gasp flourish. Such problems often mar first films, yet they are also symptomatic of this rising sub-genre. Black burlesques like Very Bad Things thrive on shock tactics, on the gut-punch of the audience gross-out. Continually labouring to top the last gag, they run the risk of expiring on successive doses of their own poison.

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