Some people want to be challenged. Some people need cheering up or a night in with their friends.
Some people want to be challenged. Some people need cheering up or a night in with their friends. Some people simply want to escape their humdrum reality for an hour and a half while the casserole’s on. There’s a plethora of reasons why people plonk themselves on a sofa and spend time with a collection of imaginary misfits and rogues. I watched ‘One Eyed Monster’ because it is about Ron Jeremy’s disembodied dick going on a murder spree, and that’s really funny.
Lubed up and ready to wobble, it’s just another day at work for Ron Jeremy. In a porn shoot up a snow ridden mountain, divas are quarrelling, directors are being douchebags and camera guys are saying long scientific words and inventing new masturbatory aids. Everything is well in genital Hollywood. Until, of course, Ron Jeremy’s tadger becomes possessed by an alien life force and starts fucking people dead. I’ve now termed this ‘The Ejacolypse’. It’s my intellectual property and trespassers will be shot.
As established, willies are inherently funny and (fictitious) murder is great to watch. The masculine answer to Teeth, it turns out, is incredibly puerile. I was gunning for this to be atrocious. And to some degree it is. The acting, especially from the support cast is, well, porny. The editing, camerawork and effects all seem to be funded from a child’s piggybank. The mandatory explosion in the finale is as underwhelming as an explosion could possibly be. And needless to say, it’s not exactly one to take a militant feminist to on a date.
However, within the film’s universe, playing up to porn stereotypes and discourses, this all serves a very clear narrative purpose. If you can stomach the concept, the rest of the film pretty much falls into place. In every frame, this film knows its mere existence is completely arbitrary, and it plays up to this premise with a big cheesy grin on it’s semen-slathered face. Jeremy is a deeply likeable presence until his nads go it alone, and the characters, though two dimensional (at a stretch) are all pitched in exact true right way. The naive romantics in the cast are hilarious and played with arresting overzealousness by Bart Fletcher and Jenny Guy. No-one gets the chance to develop as the movie progresses: they either die or stay vapid.
The film has no pretensions and is genuinely, belly-laugh funny. On purpose. Lines like ‘We’re going to need a bigger tampon’ and ‘circumsize it to oblivion… with an axe’ are gold. With a better comic cast (the Apatow school in particular) this script could have been very highly regarded for comic writing. The deaths, too, are really, really funny. They’re the only ways you could possibly be killed by a mutant member. Whether stuck to the ceiling with a monstrous layer of semen or having a hole fucked through the back of your head, the ick factor combines neatly with gross-out comedy. For a movie of this ilk, proceedings are kept surprisingly tasteful. this could have headed the way of A Serbian Film, but it reigns itself in, focusing instead on being entertaining.
Don’t get me wrong, by everyday standards this film is not good. But it’s the best film that could have been made about Ron Jeremy’s dick.
SO TERRIB… Well, it’s kind of quite good actually.
