The Tripper

***

I remember the talk of David Arquette directing a horror film a few years ago, and it was on the tongues of horror fans. Slasher movies, once all the rage in the 80s, resurging in the 90s/early 2000s, have fallen prey to stagnation. For those who hate them, this is welcome, but I’m a fan of the genre so it has been kind of a bummer for me, truthfully. But, really, there isn’t a lot left in the tank it appears. The zombie and reality horror genres have flourished, however, and so if I can find a gem every now and then (or at least something entertaining) it is cool.  It is hard to believe, to me, that this was made eleven years ago! I would love to read top ten slasher movie lists just to see if a person can put together one for the 2000s, especially the 2010s. The Tripper (2006) brings together the 60s and 2000s, with broad swipes regarding “tree hugging”, “free love”, “hippies”, obsessive love, redneck disgust with outsiders, and political angst between the right and left of the spectrum.

I’m not about to proclaim The Tripper as something great or substantially extraordinary. I love the cast, though, and Arquette’s in-your-face stylistics provides an exuberant energy (I think you can sense the director was excited about directing a film and the free reign it allowed to cover topics within the over-the-top confines of the slasher film).

Kids doping it up in a van as they head to a “free love festival” in rural Cali. Of course, George Bush is commented on as a shitty president who sucks corporate dick by sending armed forces into Iraq and how he hates black people. You have a naked couple walking about (buck naked both a dude and his girl). You get old folks either warning the kids of not walking into weed traps or pissed at them for their pro-tree philosophy. The local hicks hate the hippies, with Lucas Haas getting a bottle busted over his noggin, with girlfriend Jaime King having to stitch it up. Arquette cast himself as one of the harassing hicks who is about to assault King when an old weirdo at the service station pushes him down, resulting in the joker receiving a protruding bone sticking out if his arm (a big owwie). Jason Mewes has a part as one of the drugged kids fully committed to wasting himself into a stupor. He spends a great deal (if not all) stoned. Of course, besides the threat of the hicks, the hippies are unaware than some wacko in a Reagan mask with an ax has it out for them.

I was really thrilled with the casting of Thomas Jane as a sheriff grumblingly enduring the festival’s sexually liberated, drug-fuelled, carefree, life-loving trippers. One line has him confessing annoyingly to accusatory King (regarding a young man chasing a rabbit so he could pet it while nude from head to toe, before being dragged away to his doom), that he couldn’t waste his time chasing after guys who are “banging some other big-bushed granola-eating broad.” He was called a fascist pig for not taking the concerns of the missing guy’s girlfriend seriously. When he’s later found upside down hanging from a tree with his large intestine sticking out like an appendage Jane’s deputy asks him if he felt it was an accident! Of course Jane politely figures he couldn’t have done it to himself! Haha. Cooper, Jane's clueless deputy, wonders to him if it was possible that Bigfoot might have got to the dead guy once missing! Not unless he likes jellybeans (as Jane found one in the guy's hair).

An incident at the beginning has this kid watching environmentalists refuse to budge so his lumberjack father could cut trees down and help pay for his cancer-dying wife's medicine. Enraged by a treehugger's comment that the tree was worth more than the lumberjack's wife, the tree-cutter's son takes a chainsaw to him! Decades later, the father is now an embittered old man full of hate towards those "damn hippies who consider a tree worth more than a human life".

I thought it was a rather decent set up. Hell, slashers have done a rather shitty job in the past of setting up just why psychos pick up the chainsaw or chopping ax with something raging inside motivating them, so at least The Tripper provides something unique in that a son would stand up for his paw if he felt others were purposely trying to hurt him. That his mother died and father endured hardships due to the tree-loving activists does seem like an adequate motivation (if you are unable to corral your anger in a way less violent and life-threatening) to spurn his wrath...particularly when there's a congregation gathering in celebration that remind him of those who "robbed" him of happiness. That he took the persona and "face" of Reagan does give the film a visual sight gag, not to mention, a peculiar "identity" to the killer. Jason has his hockey mask and Michael has his Shatner mask, so why not a Reagan mask?

There's PLENTY of fun political jabs at Reagan. The old "loonies escape/released from the asylum to butcher" slasher trope is spun by Arquette using Reagan's budget cuts as California governor as a reason why the murderer of this film is set free to slay. When the killer is about to execute Balthazar Getty (playing King's explosive-tempered former boyfriend), he is befuddled because "he's a Republican". The anti-war standing (excerpts of the bodies killed and tossed to the side in Vietnam), George Bush jabs galore, cameo by Courtney Cox as an animal lover who defends the killer's man-eating dogs from police fire before being attacked herself (!), defiant tree-hugger taking a sawing by a chainsaw, a capitalist (played by Paul Reubens, absent Pee Wee Herman persona, wearing a fro, with Uncle Sam's costume) so consumed with the money in his cashbox he's willing to hide in the toilet of a crapper in order to hold on to the rewards, and enough colorful, hallucinogenic light shows (if you have a film called "The Tripper", there should be some trips, right?), nakedness, dopeheads, and party-hearty atmosphere loaded in this film, it hardly has time to stop long enough to get boring.

The conclusion is right out of the slasher handbook. No matter how many times you hit someone across the face with a hammer, it just can't inflict enough damage to keep the killer down! And King takes that hammer to him too. Over and over and over. Still if he doesn't survive, we don't get to see him split apart a scumbag with a chainsaw. So there's that.

Truth be told, in the end, The Tripper is still just a slasher movie. It is busy with "stuff" (mentioned above), and I guess hearing Reubens get "Fuck you" off his chest in a variety of ways towards everyone has its appeal, with enough blood and grue to perhaps satisfy you (the hand is cut off, with a stump spewing blood, a hunter is gutted, and a couple beheadings result from the wielding of the chopping ax) if not in the same queasy league as Savini's work. Still, I can't really say this is one of those slashers that finds its way atop the "Best Slashers of..." lists.