Originally written January 3, 2015

Well, if nothing else, Tusk is the best movie I’ve ever seen that’s about a man being transformed into a walrus. Yes, Tusk is the eleventh movie to be directed by filmmaker Kevin Smith, and to be honest I’m not really sure what happened to his career. He’s one of my favorite comedy directors out there, with the Clerks movies being among my favorite movies ever. But I don’t know, after he left the days of Jay and Silent Bob movies, his career went in a different direction, especially when he took on making a horror movie with Red State. Now Tusk seems like it’s trying to be both a comedy and a horror movie, and after watching it I was just puzzled.

Maybe some context is needed. Kevin Smith does a podcast, and on one of these podcasts the random idea of making this movie came up as a joke, but then he asked fans to do #WalrusYes on Twitter if they actually wanted him to make it. Well…he did, and so it makes sense that the movie is about a podcaster named Wallace. Wallace travels to Canada to interview someone for his show, but it winds up not working out and in desperation to get some material for his show, he calls an old man who had a note in a bar bathroom that says he has great life stories. He visits the man without anyone knowing, and the guy turns out to be a psycho that likes walruses better than humans, and so he lures victims into his home so that he can actually turn them into walruses. It’s…a different kind of concept, to be sure.

The weird thing to me is that this is a movie idea that sounds like the kind of idea someone would intentionally try to make a B-movie out of, but everyone involved with the film seems to be taking it very seriously. Like they were actually trying to make a legitimate movie out of this, and so in a way the result is kind of laughable. Don’t get me wrong, the performances from the actors and stuff is great. Justin Long plays Wallace, and Michael Parks plays the psycho killer, and he’s just able to give these long monologues and do it really well, and he plays crazy and weird in a cool performance. I was confused that were some really long scenes that never seemed to end though. I get that dialogue is Kevin Smith’s thing, but I wasn’t sure what the hell the point was that some of the people were even trying to get to. Sometimes these overdrawn scenes were hilarious, but I’m not sure if it was intentional.

I don’t know, the result is just this really strange…thing. I’m confused on what the tone is supposed to be at times, because it seems to shift between comedy and horror and drama, sometimes all within the same scene and in a really weird transition. Some movies are able to blend that together really well, but not quite this one. In the end I’m still not sure how I feel about this movie, and I gave myself a full 24 hours before writing this to let it sink in. But if someone were to ask me what I think of Tusk I’d just say “yeah Tusk was certainly…different.” I don’t know if this qualifies as a good movie or a bad movie. Kind of both. And so I’m gonna give it a rating right in the middle because I’m not sure how else to rate it.

2.5/5