Groupers (Review)
Groupers is a Wild and Crazy Ride from Start to Finish.
Sitting down to watch Groupers I was a little nervous about how absurd and potentially offensive the premise seemed. While it is most definitely absurd, I found it to be so in a most delightful way. The plot itself plays second fiddle to the bizarre characters that collide over the course of this comedy of errors. There was a lot that could have gone wrong very easily with this film, and while it’s not perfect, I was absolutely mesmerized as the outlandish events unfolded over the course of the film. I’ve never seen anything quite like Groupers before and I’m still not sure if that’s good or bad.
Oh boy, where to start with Groupers. Well, I’ll tell you now to take the premise of the film with a grain of salt. Two jocks (Peter Mayer-Klepchick and Cameron Duckett) are abducted by a mysterious woman (Nicole Dambro) and awaken bound together in the deep end of an empty swimming pool. They soon discover that they’ve been torturing her gay brother for years, insisting that his homosexuality is a choice, and now they have to face the consequences for their actions. Before you start thinking that this is going to be a terrible torture porn rip off of Saw, let me assure you that there is no gore in this film. They don’t have to cut off their arms or rip out their teeth. Instead, they simply have to look deep into each other’s eyes and pop a raging hard-on. It’s a choice, right? So it should be easy for them to escape. Well, it’s hardly that simple and pretty soon, everything has gone terribly wrong.
Despite this being writer/director Anderson Cowan’s first feature film, he seems well prepared for the challenge. As I mentioned, the premise is a bit hard to swallow at times and might even prevent some people from giving this film a shot. However, he took great care in crafting these characters, and while some are a bit better-fleshed out than others, each of them are simply fascinating. The film walks a delicate line between insanity and self-indulgence, and while it stumbles a few times it manages to put on an impressive act overall. For the most part, I found the dialogue to have a dark and keen sense of humor to it, though there were a few times where the lines felt a little unwieldy for the characters. Still, even when I found the premise to be just a little too unbelievable for its own good, I never lost my desire to see what came next and what new problem was going to be thrown at the characters.
What makes Groupers so engrossing is the perfectly assembled cast. I was especially taken in by Nicole Dambro who plays the vengeful Meg (who is also using this experiment for her thesis). She seems to be the only one with a good head on her shoulders and while she doesn’t quite see the forest for the trees when it comes to the events of the film, her snark and slightly off-kilter sensibilities endear her to the audience. Myer-Klepchick and Duckett start the film off weak, but as things progress their characters quickly become more interesting simply because while they might seem like the villains, it’s revealed that none of the people involved are saints. The problem with them is that while they try to play a couple of a-holes, both of them just seem too nice even when they try their best to be jerks. It’s a bit unnatural, but I came to appreciate it by the end. While I wish I could go through the entire cast one by one, that would take way too long. I do want to recognize Terrance Wentz for his part in the film. He comes in late but proves to be the dessert at the end of the meal with a character that proves you should never judge a book by its cover.
Groupers definitely has an indie film vibe to it. However, I found the director of photography, Milan Janicin’s work to be invaluable when it came to adding legitimacy to the film. Often I see indie films that use the high contract, high frame rate aesthetic that you see with most reasonably priced digital camera. It can be jarring and downright distracting, going so far as to even cheapen the film. I really appreciated his work and which just goes to show that an experienced cinematographer can make or break any movie. In contrast, I found a few of the transitions between scenes to be a bit off-putting, feeling more like the film was coming back from a commercial break rather than trying to portray the passage of time. Overall, the technical aspects of Grouperz provide a solid foundation for this incredibly strange story.
In the end, I found Groupers to be a crazy tale filled with colorful characters vaguely reminiscent of writer Carl Hiaasen’s Florida Noir style. I would say that while it has won a few awards, I don’t believe it is going to get the recognition or attention that it deserves, it’s a solid movie and more importantly, it’s a fun one. Sure, the story seems daunting at first and it definitely won’t appeal to everyone. However, like many of the characters in it, Groupers is a movie that you shouldn’t judge by its cover. I certainly know a few people in my life that I’m going to recommend it to and if you like dark off-beat comedies, then I can definitely recommend this to you too.
