WAKE N BAKE

in which Erin informs you of the best movies to blaze to

I’m not sure how many people out there would say they hate Chris Elliott but people who say, unprompted, that they love him are sort of like people who enjoy durian fruit.  If you get it, you just get it, and you geek out whenever you meet another person who’s into it.  If you don’t get it, you politely conceal your “What the fuck is wrong with you?” face.  The flipside, however, is that most durian/Chris Elliott fanatics will understand why their beloved fruit/comic actor is not for everyone.  I mean, durian tastes like a crossbreed of banana and papaya that sat in the fridge next to a chopped onion for a week.  And it looks like brains.  It’s fucking disgusting.  It takes a hero (or a moron) to like something like that.  So if you’re one of these heroes, you will already know of Cabin Boy (1994), the Tim Burton-produced flop that was admitted to the burn ward after the critics got a hold of it.

It starts out normal enough.  Nathaniel Mayweather, a rich asshole of a student at a finishing school, receives a letter from his father that he’s been chosen to run his hotel in Hawaii.  He ditches his fellow students, tells the headmaster to kiss his ass, and sets off to board his dad’s yacht.  A series of unfortunate errors leads him to “The Filthy Whore,” a fishing boat where he must endure chum-guzzling drunkards and conversations with the dimwitted cabin boy (Andy Richter.)  From here it becomes progressively less focused.  The screenplay by Adam Resnick is, bluntly put, idiotic.  What other word describes a film in which an arrogant fancy lad hallucinates uncouth talking cupcakes before meeting the girl of his dreams while she is afloat, napping in the ocean during a circumnavigatorial swim?  And that only covers about half of it.  Normally when I do my reviews I give you a much fuller serving of the plot and story arc, but here it would just be pointless.  You would be frightened and confused, wondering if your Internet browser was repeatedly switching tabs without you noticing.  The plot wanders drunkenly from set-up to set-up, stopping in at multiple premises but never opening up a tab; trying to point the boat towards Hawaii, keeping tabs on a mysterious man-shark creature, winning Trina’s heart, searching for the six-armed, blue cliff-dweller. There is no dignity or linearity in this film.  It makes Batman and Robin look stately as shit.

Not that our state is a good rubric for that adjective, but whatever.

Hot mess though it is, Cabin Boy is immensely enjoyable, despite (or perhaps because of?) its hopelessly overdressed content.  Not to mention that this is Chris Elliott we’re talking about here.  It’s not as if anyone ever expected him to do something dignified.  Stupid is his specialty.  To him, the ridiculous is funny and part of the joke is getting the audience to follow him down such a strange path of non-sequiturs and insufferable density.  He’s always played such great jerks–the kind that are at once self-absorbed yet painfully self-unaware, and it just so happens that weed pairs excellently with stupid comedy!  He also traffics heavily in the just-plain-goofy and it always works.  A classic example from Get A Life:

It is not necessary to be initiated into the Cult of Elliott to like this movie.  I guess marijuana is not necessary either, but it sure does help.  There’s watching films, and then there’s watching films in a voyeuristic sense.  For the latter, there’s something desperately alluring about a film nobody likes. And nobody liked Cabin Boy, save for die-hard fans of the sitcom Get A Life.  But this makes it all even funnier.  Another thing you discover about Cabin Boy is that it’s strangely childlike.  It’s low-budget, fantastical, and cartoonish.  In fact, it reminds me a lot of the live-action adventure movies for kids in the 90s.  It’s like a disorganized Goonies with more cussing and adultery.  Which makes it a horrible choice for your Cinematic Masterpieces 101 project, but a pretty faithful blazing companion.

Ultimately, this is one of those cases where the comedic voices behind the project create an appeal that goes way beyond the final product (blessedly, in this case).  Nobody honestly thinks this movie is really any good.  But Elliott and Resnick, having put in their years with Letterman (who makes a cameo appearance) and Get A Life, make it more of a performance for their fans than a blockbuster hopeful.  We know that they’re capable of great things and it softens our view of… whatever the hell this monstrously deformed ode to silliness is.

For although Elliott has done dumb things, he recovered from Cabin Boy and went on to do Eagleheart on Adult Swim.  And it is one of the best things I have ever seen.