The problem with Otis is that it keeps getting in its own way.
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It's been close to five decades since Alfred Hitchcock directed his little gem of a black comedy, "Psycho." While not everybody saw it as a dark comedy, I've always felt Hitch combined a subtly grim wit with some chilling suspense and a couple of outright grisly murders to produce a masterpiece of humorous horror. Now, producer-director Tony Krantz ("Sublime") and writers Erik Jendresen ("Sublime") and Thomas Schnauz ("Reaper") try their hand at something similar, with more limited success.
"Otis" (2008) is another entry in Warner Bros.' direct-to-video horror series "Raw Feed," this time a seriocomic look at serial-killer films, slasher flicks, torture porn, and revenge pictures. That's quite a bit to attempt in a 100-minute movie, but along the way it manages to make amusing references to things like "Silence of the Lambs," "Saw," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Friday the 13th," "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "Prom Night," "Fargo," "Blue Velvet," and, of course, "Psycho," among many others. That it never quite accomplishes its goal is not for a lack of trying, and the movie is a small step up from previous "Raw Feed" releases like "Rest Stop," "Believers," and the same production team's "Sublime."
The problem with "Otis" is that it keeps getting in its own way. It tries so hard to be earnest about its satire that it winds up too serious, too macabre, and too voyeuristic to be too funny. Despite the film's comically sardonic intentions, there is far too much in it that is just as sick and exploitative as the films that it's spoofing.
The plot concerns your typical madman terrorizing your typical middle-American community. In this case it's Otis Broth (Bostin Christopher), a forty-year-old, overweight man-child working as a pizza-delivery guy in suburbia. Of course, he's also a sexually perverted pedophile maniac who kidnaps teen girls, chains them in a dungeon rigged up with video cameras and electrical devices, and forces them to reenact a prom-night dance with him. If they don't cooperate, he kills them and saws their bodies apart. Riley Lawson (Ashley Johnson) is victim number six.
Riley lives with her typical, conservative, middle-American parents (Illeana Douglas and Daniel Stern) and a typically rebellious, pot-smoking teen brother (Jared Kusnitz) who is fond of videotaping her while she's undressing and then showing the movies on the Internet. When Riley goes missing, the family brings in the FBI. That's the first half of the story. During the second half, Riley escapes, and the family decide to exact their own brand of vengeance, which goes horribly, and cheerfully, awry.
In the disc's accompanying features the director and the co-writer explain that they didn't want to make "Otis" into another blatant parody like the "Scary Movie" franchise. They wanted to create a more refined satire that would be funny in a more serious way. It appears they were trying for something like the Coen brothers' "Fargo" or David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," where beneath the rosy veneer of a quiet community, there lies an unspeakable evil, a villainy that lurks in all of us. Unfortunately, the mixture of comedy and horror in "Otis" doesn't blend smoothly, and the results are uneven.
The filmmakers do half the story and half the characters straight, the other half for laughs. Riley, Otis, and Otis's older brother (Kevin Pollak) are dead serious. Riley's two parents, her brother, and especially the bumbling idiot (Jere Burns) who heads up the FBI investigation play it strictly as farce. What is the audience to make of this?
Worse than the movie's shortage of substance or laughs, however, is its lack of tension. Like most slasher flicks, we don't have much invested in the characters; therefore, we don't really care what happens to them. That would be fine if the film were entirely comedy, which it isn't. So, again, what are we to think? And with nonstop music from Otis's era (Blue Oyster Cult, Talking Heads, B-52's, etc.) playing raucously in the background, maybe we can forgive the poor viewer who gives up on it early.
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[release]23387[/release]