Father's Day (2011)

No Netflix And Chill this week. Why? Because . . . "Sons, lock up your fathers... vengeance arrives on... Father's Day!"

The second film from Astron-6 (a Canadian film production company beloved by genre fans for the shorts and features that they've released since being founded back in 2007), Father's Day is a hilarious blend of ridiculous gore, gratuitous nudity, familiar genre movie tropes, and very dark comedy. There's also a running theme of male rape, shown often enough to make me decide that I should warn viewers who may not have the stomach for such content.

Chris Fuchman (played by Mackenzie Murdock) is a serial killer who specialises in picking fathers as victims. He rapes them and murders them, and he's done this at least ten times. One of those victims was the father of siblings Ahab (Adam Brooks) and Chelsea (Amy Groening), and the former ended up spending a decade in prison after killing the wrong man while looking to exact some revenge. With Fuchmans back doing what he does best, a priest (Father John Sullivan, played by Matthew Kennedy), is tasked with convincing Ahab that he should still work on hunting down the depraved killer. Working together, with some help from Chelsea, as well as Andrew AKA "Twink" (Conor Sweeney), these angry mothers are determined to keep fathers safe.

As well as taking on lead roles, Brooks, Sweeney, and Kennedy share the writing and directing duties with Jeremy Gillespie and Steve Kostanski, which is usually the way with Astron-6 productions. All of them seem to be well-versed in the type of cinema that they're referencing, and sometimes gently mocking, and all of them work well together to deliver a film that feels like one impressively unique and singular vision. The presentation allows for a fictional "TV schedule" framing element, which also allows for a fake trailer to be placed at around the halfway point, but nobody tries to haul the film off down too many side-roads towards self-indulgence. While the first act throws a lot of different elements into the mix, it all comes together and stays relevant to the main plot strand (the main group aiming to hunt down and kill Fuchman).

The acting is intended to be super-cheesy, and it is (Brooks being the best, having a blast in the grizzled, eyepatch-wearing, role that would be portrayed by a Kurt Russell/Clint Eastwood knock-off in the 1980s), the music - courtesy of Gillespie and Paul Joyce - is a perfect fit for the visual style, and the gore gags are jaw-droppingly impressive at times; maybe even a bit too impressive, especially when men end up with their eyes watering as they watch some graphic penis trauma in one main scene.

Father's Day is the kind of distasteful opus that Lloyd Kaufman would be proud of, which makes his involvement here in a producing AND acting capacity no big surprise, but the quality of the special effects and the film-making technique raises this far above what you'd expect from anything being presented by the head honcho at Team Troma. It has some of the crudity and craziness you could find in most Troma movies, but it's very much stamped with the identity and passion of Astron-6.  And while it's more accomplished than the first Astron-6 feature (the enjoyable Manborg), and a lot of people love it, I will always think of it as a stepping stone on the way to the greatness of both The Editor and Psycho Goreman.

8/10

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