A Haggard Review
Outsider Art and its Portents
Farce: mistaken identities, improbable situations, violent horseplay, and miscommunication abound. You, a literati, are familiar with Ten Things I Tamed About Shrew, A Committee of Errors, and of course, A Midsummer’s Wet Dream. Shakespeare was a heck of a guy - back when men were men and boys were women. Well, everything old is new again!
You’re aware that farce is alive and well. It lives on in your personal life, and probably movies and television. Fawlty Towers, The Naked Gun Movies, and of course, Frasier. “Oh, Doctor Crane, you pretentious oaf, you’ve gone and scheduled two dates at the same time! However will you psychology your way out of this pickle?” Trigger warning: your split sides may never recover from the peals of laughter after viewing “Mixed Doubles” (S4, E6).
Anyway, here’s the hook. What if I told you that the greatest farce of the 21st Century convinced the world that it did not exist? What if I told you it was written, directed, and co-starring Chester County, PA’s favorite auteur, Bam Margera? I’m talking of course about 2003’s magnum opus: Haggard. What if I told you that it’s available for free? What if I told you that this question is actually a statement?
Yes, we are through the looking glass. One of the greatest cinematic triumphs of all time has been relegated to obscurity partly due to the fact that absolutely no woman likes it. Not even April Margera. But why is this movie a bellwether? Because it’s a shining example of the phrase du jour: “You can just do things.”
Off a $500K budget, Bam and friends conservatively grossed $1.5M-$5M, if you include DVD sales. But money is not what’s really important. As Chester A. Arthur said, “Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.” A group of friends, at the peak of their powers, decided to make a feature film and it’s clear they loved doing it.
The plot is straightforward and insane. Ryan Dunn (RIP) has been dumped by his capricious girlfriend, Glauren, in favor of a feral metalhead named Hellboy (Rake Yohn). Her reasoning, “What I need right now is heavy metal music, hard drinkin’, mayhem… shit you can't offer me right now.”
It's your classic tale of star-crossed white-trash lovers. They express soliloquies in that fast-paced, nasal tone replete with dropped or modified consonants and curious phonetic patterns that clearly identify it as a Mid-Atlantic. This accent is also known as hoagie-mouth - must be something in “da wodder.”
Ryan vacillates between being depressed, begging his ex to get back together, breaking liquor bottles behind Wawa, and plotting revenge. He recruits his friends, played by Bam Margera and Brandon Dicamillo, to spy on her and vandalize her house. No one has ever dreamt up schemes like this:
The B-Plot features Brandon Dicamillo trying to win the “Invention of the Future Contest” by inventing the reverse microwave. His character Falcone is an aspiring mad scientist and sports a glorious context-free French accent. He provides manic moments of absurdity by playing with G.I. Joes in his basement and frying on LSD. It’s by far the strongest and funniest performance of the film. He also moonlights as 2 other characters, including an emcee with a beard that is clearly made of cotton balls. Now that’s the kind of frugal, hardhat and lunch pail spirit we need in the arts!
The flimsy plot is duct-taped together, like so many shit-logs to a garage door, by physical comedy stunts and gross-out gags that typified the peak Jackass era. The townspeople of West Chester are pure cartoons: Chris Raab doing the “kiki” voice (“Uwaoooo”), Jason Ellis as a psychotic record store owner, and a toga-clad Don Vito (RIP) being fed grapes, care of some topless women. It's also a murderers row of cameos from the ‘00s skateboarding scene. Spoiler alert: if you don’t recognize the cop character, you’re a poser, bro. There’s even an inexplicable town-wide affinity for the awful heavy metal band “Gnar Kill.” But I’ll be danged if it doesn’t all fit together.
The smash cut gag of Raab’s “fender bender” and Ellis’ unhinged destruction of bad CDs are among the film's many great five-second comedy heat checks. A digression: I once had the opportunity to meet Jason Ellis a few years ago at a comedy festival and asked him about his memories of Haggard. Jason Ellis is scarier now: shaved bald, gold grill, and face tattoos. He looks like a pirate who escaped from jail. This all tracks, considering he’s an Australian: “Yeah, I remember that shit. Rake Yohn was such a pussy. When I was beating his arse in the movie, he was crying that I cut his lips from scraping his braces.”
Aesthetically, they took some swings that landed. The cinematography is unique. It might be up there with Lawrence of Arabia. The dudes experimented with weird camera angles, filters, and at times, frame rates, and they pulled it off. The skate metal/ hip-hop soundtrack rules.
Will Ryan grow up and move on? Will Bam get his friend back? Will Brandon win a mountain bike made of diamonds? Will you loan me $20?
In college, I often wrote things like “in conclusion” to satisfy a word count, but nowadays, I’m breaking with convention. What I am saying is this: these guys had no business making a feature motion picture. They did it anyway and made an instant cult classic. Kick-flip over the gatekeepers. What’s stopping you? Like a reverse microwave, you too can make things cool, like, really fast.
