Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Separating offensive humor from “edge lord” humor is a lot like a Supreme Court justice trying to define “obscenity precisely” – you know it, as Potter Stewart said, when you see it. But let me try to propose one: Edgelord humor is grandiose, confrontational, and self-satisfied. There can be badly told offensive jokes and good edgelord ones, but, more often than not, the latter is significantly more annoying than the former when stretched out to something beyond a 4chan greentext or a meme. That annoyance – of rolling your eyes while your time is being wasted by some moron who thinks that Reddit-level atheism (“le magic sky fairy”) is Voltaire-level anti-clerical satire – is the key thing.
One can be indifferent to offensive humor, entertained by it, or, best of all, offended by it, but it takes special people to take material that would be rightly ignored by even the most committed circlejerking subs and convince a bunch of financiers to pay for it, and, worse, decent actors to star in it. Then again, those tax credits over in Europe sure are forgiving, and Krazy House, a nightmarish bore helmed by Dutch filmmakers Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, is enough to make even the most committed socialist wonder if Barry Goldwater was on to something.
Imagine if your average Halo 3 lobby back in 2007 decided to get together and make a movie (but were banned from saying most slurs), and you’d probably wind up with something like this, an 86-minute skewering of the inherent American family values, propriety, and phoniness within your average ‘90s sitcom, as well as Christianity, the go-to religious punching bag ever since the decline-and-fall of the American evangelical movement. You’ve got mutilated animals, drug abuse, necrophilia, teen pregnancy, exploding heads, dead babies, murdered religious figures, sausage parties, cop killers, drunk Russians, self-harm, and all manner of other “offensive” subject matter that slowly begins to undermine the precious world that the Christians (you can feel the directors looking at you and going “snap je het” as they adjust their clogs and try to forget that the Spanish National Team is still their country’s father) live in. If any part of this movie works — aside from one or two running gags that are reasonably well set up and Nick Frost’s absurd commitment to the bit has the family’s patriarch — it’s the first twenty or thirty minutes, which do a decent job of replicating the vibe, if not the content, of the late ‘80s sitcom. You’ve got your stark lighting, painted backdrops, flat pastel designs, sweater vests, and wacky pratfall hijinks, and if it weren’t for all the bullshit about Jesus, it’d probably be a pretty passable imitation.
Even then, that style wears out its welcome — lasting a full 10 minutes longer than the entirety of Too Many Cooks — and quickly gets abandoned once shit gets real in favor of your generic budget action-styling, but not before the creeping influence of “reality” begins to corrupt the family members once three Russian goons, a father and two kids, show up, offering their help as handymen. Mom (Alicia Silverstone) gets a concussion and starts to swear, the dorky boy-crazy daughter starts banging the mullet-sporting eldest Russian kid, and the nerdy son, obsessed with science, begins to cook up meth with the other Russian child. Meanwhile, the Russians are destroying the damn house instead of fixing it, and the good-natured dad, a ne’er-do-well with a heart of gold and a pure love for Jesus, begins to fray at the edges, as he starts having weird visions of himself muttering “kill them all.” At some point, the cops show up, and what starts as a case of “If You Give A Russian Some Vodka…” becomes a hostage situation, as the whole façade that they’ve built their lives around begins to collapse like the studio lighting. As the situation for the family becomes more and more Job-like, they’ll learn exactly why the Russians are there, and Dad will have to open up a can of whoop-ass on the three gopota, but not before having a heart-to-heart with Christ himself (Kevin Connelly).
Let me make one thing absolutely plain: The only thing I was offended by in all of Krazy House was that I wasted my time watching it instead of doing something productive, like running into traffic in the middle of Park City or getting smothered in an avalanche on one of the slopes. Outside of Frost (who is even instructed to abandon the accent work he did when the third act comes around), the entire film is an exercise in pithily lame escalation, but one without the rigor to hold true to the style it established — the mismatch between the aesthetic and the content of Too Many Cooks is at the heart of what makes that short both funny and vaguely terrifying, and even then, once the short outstays its welcome in the family home, expands to a whole host of other kinds of pastiche.
But honestly, the sitcom is a boring fucking target at this point. They have not existed in this form for decades and were already a punching bag for their more ribald or risqué contemporaries like The Simpsons or Married… with Children. It feels like the two main reasons reason that Haars and van der Kuil chose this format, as opposed to any other, is because A) Happy Tree Friends already took cartoon violence to brain-squishing levels, and Friends is too much of a sacred cow amongst zoomers and B) it’s an easy shorthand for the kind of banal anti-American sentiment recited by dumbass teenagers to look worldly in the time before they learn about the actually bad shit our country has done. But I guess those windmills get patchy reception over in Holland, which is the entirety of the Netherlands.
What’s worse is that I’m their target audience — I am the motherfucker who laughs during Von Trier movies while other people are reaching for the barf bags, and I like lots of genuinely terrible edgelord humor, like the later seasons of Family Guy — and all they did here was irritate the fuck out of me (they often say that we hate in others what we hate in ourselves, and it’s true; I was an annoying teenager once, and man, this would have felt like transgressive art back when I was a freshman in high school). But at least the occasionally sneering nature of Seth MacFarlane’s series’ approach to humor and culture is limited by both the cut-away gags, a 22-minute runtime, and the influence of standards and practices, all of which force the writers to be somewhat creative with how they approach bawdy and/or extreme humor. The Krazy House approach is just to throw every shitpost the filmmakers read between 2007 and 2011 while praying that something sticks long enough to get a chuckle.
I was straight-up astonished that they didn’t just recite old Something Awful bits like catechisms at a certain point in the futile hope that they’d get a pity laugh from any former goons in the audience. And then they did, at least once. Any motherfucker who puts a Rick Astley joke in a movie nowadays and calls attention to it deserves to have their internet access permanently severed, and Krazy House would be Exhibit A in this case.