Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Yoga Hosers (2016)


Kevin Smith has been a divisive filmmaker for many years. People love him or they hate him. Part of it stems from how he has navigated the Hollywood system, from indie darling to touring his movies around the country because, as he says, nobody wanted to finance his ideas so he did it himself. I’m paraphrasing and generalizing the whole Red State debacle, but just go with me here. He created his own little niche area of the movie business and has turned out some interesting, though not always successful, things.

How does Kevin Smith fit into Sunday “Bad” Movies? There are three movies that people always pick from his filmography when they want to discuss his lesser work. Jersey Girl was the first one, released after he originally intended to close the book (literally, with Alanis Morisette closing a book at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) on his View Askewniverse. It didn’t fare too well, either critically or commercially, and he immediately went back to the Askewniverse with Clerks II (my pick for his best movie). Then there was Cop Out, the one time he directed a movie not based on his own script, and the one that felt the least like a Kevin Smith movie. Then there was this week’s movie.


Yoga Hosers was the second movie, following Tusk, in what Smith dubbed the True North Trilogy, though the third has yet to be made. Colleen (Harley Quinn Smith) and Colleen (Lily-Rose Depp) were two teenage girls working at Eh-2-Zed, a convenience store owned by one of their dads. On the night they planned to go to a senior party, they got forced into working. They weren’t even supposed to be there that day. Anyway, while on shift, they discovered Bratzis (Kevin Smith), a bunch of Nazi sausages, and had to fight to stop the next wave of Nazis from re-emerging and conquering Canada.

If that concept sounded a little messy, let me assure you that the movie was just as messy as it sounded. It was a mishmash of ideas that sometimes never came together in a cohesive way. There were Nazi sausages. There were characters who had both Canadian accents and New York accents at the same time. There was a satanic murder subplot that went nowhere. The big villain showed up and laid out his whole plan while doing impressions of famous actors. Johnny Depp even showed up as his Quebecer detective from Tusk to try and solve another series of grisly murders. Writer/director Kevin Smith threw everything at the movie, and it didn’t all stick.

What I want to write about, however, is that Yoga Hosers wasn’t nearly as bad as most people insisted it was. It was fine. There was nothing special about it. There was nothing that stood out as a great moment or a great bit of entertainment. But it did enough that it was easily palatable. There was enough to it that it was memorable, albeit not necessarily in a good way. Yoga Hosers was a mess of a movie, but it was a watchable mess of a movie that didn’t feel like a waste of time. Here are some of the things it did well enough to keep it from being utterly terrible.


The thing about Yoga Hosers that most impressed me was its sense of tone. Say what you will about the individual ideas and how well they did or didn’t fit together, Kevin Smith had a tone in mind while making the movie and really nailed that tone. The two Colleens were a middle-aged man’s idea of stereotypical teenage girls, heightened to the point of farce. They were sarcastic and insulting to everyone but themselves. They liked to sing and dance, ignoring their work duties to have fun. Then there was their obsession with their phones, something that structured the whole story.

Let me elaborate on the phone thing. There are two main ways that the phones structured the story. One was the introduction of the characters. Nearly every character was introduced through an Instagram-like profile page. It was an app that the girls were obsessed with, which was why they weren’t suspicious when the most popular guy in school wanted to invite them to a senior party (he planned on murdering them, not partying). They were only active on social media, not through face-to-face social interactions. They had no real friends, making them the perfect candidates to be sacrificially murdered. The other reason was that their main goal was always to get their phones back. They got their phones taken away while at school and never felt whole until getting them back at the end of the day. Then they were arrested after the botched murders because the police thought they murdered the guys trying to murder them, but it was the Bratzis that did the killing. They went along with Guy LaPointe’s investigation because they wanted their phones back. Their story chugged along because of the phones, even if the story wasn’t about the phones at all.


Another aspect of Yoga Hosers that was well done was the world building. Sure, the building blocks were laid out in Tusk, the previous movie in the True North Trilogy. Yoga Hosers built on that foundation by expanding on the Winnipeg of Kevin Smith’s imagination. Much like in the previous film, the Canada that was shown was a heightened world of stereotypes. People said “aboot” and “eh” a lot. The convenience store was called “Eh-2-Zed.” People were, mostly, friendly. At least, they put on friendly façades. Aside from the Nazis and Bratzis.

Speaking of which, the Nazi history of Winnipeg in Yoga Hosers was an interesting addition to the world that Kevin Smith built. The True North Trilogy seemed to really be hitting on Nazis getting the comeuppance they deserved. Tusk had Justin Long and Haley Joel Osment playing two hosts for a podcast called The Not See Party. Yoga Hosers saw Haley Joel Osment return to play the leader of the Canadian Nazi party in flashbacks. According to the lore, the Canadian branch of the Nazi party was centred in Winnipeg. It was a growing party until the leader was arrested by the feds and his right-hand man went into hiding. That hiding would later be revealed to be a cryogenic freeze that he woke up from in present time. This world-building tied historical fiction into the horror comedy.


The final thing worth mentioning about Yoga Hosers that made it a fine movie was the cast. Much of it was lined with Kevin Smith regulars. Kevin Smith played the Bratzis. His daughter was one of the Colleens. Jason Mewes popped up for a scene. Ralph Garman was the right-hand man to the Canadian Fuhrer. Justin Long was in there as a yoga instructor. And Smith’s wife played the mother of the Colleen his daughter played. But then there were other actors brought in to fill out other roles, and they were mostly good in those roles. Johnny Depp, Haley Joel Osment, Harley Morenstein, and Genesis Rodriguez all returned from Tusk as different characters. Austin Butler, Tony Hale, Natasha Lyonne, Tyler Posey, Sasheer Zamata, and Stan Lee all showed up as well. They all seemed to be having fun in their roles even if some of them were really struggling with that Canadian accent (Natasha Lyonne and Stan Lee could barely cover their true accents). It was just an all-around fun cast to watch as they had fun making a dumb horror comedy.


I’m not here to say that Yoga Hosers was a masterpiece or anything like that. I’d agree that it wasn’t all that good. What I disagree with is people saying that it was a terrible movie. Yoga Hosers was fine. It had a consistent tone. It built an interesting little world, albeit not accurate at all to the Canada that I live in and know. And it had actors who may not have turned in the best performances, but were clearly having fun being in the goofy movie. There’s a lot of stuff out there that doesn’t even have those qualities. There’s a lot of stuff out there that is worse.

I wouldn’t even say that Yoga Hosers is the worst thing that Kevin Smith has worked on. He didn’t direct Vulgar, sure, but his success led to his friend being able to. That one was much worse. Then there was Cop Out. I haven’t seen that one in a few years. Smith did direct that one, based on a script he didn’t write, and it was just a very middle of the road movie. Nothing stood out about it beyond a small Seann William Scott role. It didn’t have the same sort of charm that Yoga Hosers had through the three things I mentioned, and I would argue that makes Cop Out the worse movie. I don’t know. Yoga Hosers was fine.

People have their own opinions on Kevin Smith. They either like him or they don’t, and they’ve got many reasons why. I tend to enjoy his work. For the most part, that is. There’s usually some heart and sincerity to his work that few other filmmakers tend to include. It makes even his most farcical and fantastic ideas hit home. They resonate. That’s why I’ll always be up for a new Kevin Smith movie. The world is better for him being out here releasing things.


Now for some notes:

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The Mangler (1995)


When it comes to supernatural horror, possessions are one of the major culprits. A person becomes the host vessel for a demonic force that wants nothing more than to torment people. There’s also frequently a Biblical connection with possession stories. How better to defeat a demonic force than to use the word of God. I know that ignores the many other religions and beliefs in the world for Christian ideals, but that seems to be how the possession story works.

Possessions don’t only happen to people, though. There are other ways that a demonic force can possess a vessel to torment people. The vessel could be another animal. A dog, a cat, or a goat could be possessed. A demonic force could use a pet as a vessel to break down the owner’s mental state by exploiting the love they have for that pet. That’s not even the strangest way that a demon could find a vessel. It could also use an inanimate object as a host from which it can terrorize the world.


This week’s movie, The Mangler, involved a possessed object. Office John Hunton (Ted Levine) was called to the scene of a grisly accident at Blue Ribbon Laundry. A woman fell into a folding machine and was killed when her body was folded like a clean sheet. After seeing laundry owner Bill Gartley (Robert Englund) quickly start the machine again, with minimal investigation into what went wrong, Hunton kept an eye on the place. He soon realized that there was some sort of evil in the machine, an evil that wanted a virgin sacrifice, one that Gartley would be happy to provide.

Stephen King wrote The Mangler as a short story and released it as part of his Night Shift anthology in 1978. It was one of many Stephen King tales that involved a possessed object. In this case, it was an industrial laundry machine that folded clean sheets. The movie expanded on the story, but the essentials were the same. Nightshade and the blood of a virgin were still there to bring it to life. And, much like the story it was based on, the movie featured the machine breaking way from it’s moorings to attack people outside the laundromat. It was all there.

The main problem with The Mangler, however, was a problem that many of the possessed object stories have. A stationary object doesn’t strike fear in audiences. If the object can’t move, it can’t physically do anything to people unless they approach it. The laundry machine couldn’t have folded the woman unless she was leaning against it and reached for her pills that had fallen on it. It couldn’t have broken a hose and burned a woman unless she was working at it. If people stayed away from the machine, it wouldn’t be able to get them.

Well, it mostly wouldn’t be able to get them. There were two instances when things changed. The first was when some part of the demonic force was transferred into an old refrigerator that was shipped elsewhere. That fridge was able to trap a child inside and suffocate them. The other instance was at the conclusion of the movie when John Hunton was trying to save Gartley’s virgin niece. The machine got a quick taste before Hunton pulled her out, and it came off their moorings to chase them through the bowels of the laundromat. It became the creature that it never was before.


The stationary type of threat was present in Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes, as well. After the haunting in Amityville, a bunch of priests entered the house to exorcise any remaining demons. One of the demonic forces transferred its being into a crazy looking lamp while a priest looked on. That lamp was shipped cross-country to California, allowing the demon to torment another family. It took them a while to figure out the haunting was coming from the lamp. When they did, they tossed it right out the window. I’m not sure how that was going to solve anything. It clearly didn’t, with the movie ending on a cliffhanger of the family cat now being possessed.

The idea of a possessed object would permeate throughout the Amityville franchise, through both the original run, and the many unassociated Amityville movies that followed. The lamp was able to use its powers to torment people. It would be followed by a possessed clock that could manipulate time (I still think that’s a cool wrinkle), a possessed mirror, a possessed dollhouse that could manipulate space, and a possessed toy monkey. When the simple haunted land wouldn’t suffice, the possessed item was a crutch that the series heavily leaned on.


Going back Stephen King, he also heavily relied on possessed objects throughout his writing. Or, maybe relied upon isn’t the right term. He wrote a great many other stories and novels that weren’t about possessed items. But he would always come back to that idea. He seemed fascinated by the idea that a simple item could be the cause of so much terror in someone’s life. The Mangler was just one story that hit on that theme. Christine had a possessed car. He also wrote Word Processor of the Gods, a story about a word processor that granted the user the ability to rewrite history. Not quite possession, but a super-powered everyday item.

Another big one from Mr. King was Trucks, a short story that has been adapted to film twice. The most notable adaptation was Maximum Overdrive, the only movie that Stephen King directed. It involved a group of people who were trapped in a truck stop while possessed machinery, mostly trucks, surrounded them. There was only one machine that was possessed in The Mangler. Maximum Overdrive was about a bunch of machines being possessed. Trucks were possessed. Arcade games were possessed. Lawnmowers, a bascule bridge, and a pop machine were possessed. And all the machines wanted to do was kill humans or use humans to aid the survival of the machines.


It feels like Stephen King has a fascination with inanimate objects coming to life to fight back against the people that use them. His writing is the everyday horror version of the impending sentience of artificial intelligence. Some people write about robots feeling like slaves, fighting back against oppressors. Stephen King writes about trucks and laundry presses that come to life and take the lives of the people who use and abuse them. Same basic idea approached differently and played out differently.

Many other writers have also taken that approach to their storytelling. Rather than take on the moral conundrum of artificial intelligence and sentience, the writers will create evil, possessed objects that attack people. Why? Because the idea of humans losing control of the comfortable lives they live, atop the hierarchy of the world… It frightens those same humans. What if life wasn’t as cozy and comfortable as your couch as you read or watch something? People fear that feeling. They fear losing the power to take things for granted. These types of stories really nail that idea.


Now it’s time for a few notes:

  • I mentioned or alluded to a few other movies I’ve covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Maximum Overdrive (week 479), Amityville4: The Evil Escapes (week 500), Amityville: It’s About Time (week 500), Amityville: A New Generation (week 500), Amityville Dollhouse (week 500), and Amityville Toybox (week 500).
  • Robert Englund made his third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in The Mangler. His other appearances were in Wishmaster (week 410) and Zombie Strippers! (week 463).
  • Jeremy Crutchley has been in Death Race: Inferno (week 9), The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (week 380), and The Mangler.
  • The final third appearance was Demetre Philips, who was in The Mangler, Stone Cold (week 423), and Zapped! (week 438).
  • Next up, we’ve got Danny Keogh, who appeared in Death Race 2 (week 9) and The Mangler.
  • Ted Levine was the star of The Mangler. He had a supporting role in Wild Wild West (week 296).
  • Ron Smerczak was in both The Mangler and Pets to the Rescue (week 351).
  • Finally, Adrian Waldron made a second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in The Mangler, after appearing in Sniper: Reloaded (week 506).
  • Have you seen The Mangler? What did you think of it? What other movies about possessed objects did I miss, outside of the serial killers in objects movies? Share your thoughts with me on Twitter or in the comments.
  • If there’s a movie that you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, tell me about it. Hit me up on Twitter with suggestions. Or you can just find me in the comments and let me know there. Either way works.
  • Now let’s look at what’s coming up. The next post, which should also go up tonight, will be about a little movie called Yoga Hosers. This is my catch-up day, so three posts are going out at once. You’ll find out about next week’s movie soon enough. See you then.

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