Sons, Lock-up Your Fathers: Father's Day (2011)

Father's Day (2011)

Rating: **

Starring: Adam Brooks, Mackenzie Murdock and Matthew Kennedy

I honestly never understand the fan following for Troma movies. I mean, yeah, these films are shlocky cheese-fest loaded with blood, boobs and taboos, terrible things I'm up for in my horror movies at any day given, but there's a limit to how dumb and exploitative a film can be for me to enjoy and some, if not most of Troma releases tend to go a little further beyond my what I could tolerate. To be fair, I do have my share Troma releases that I like such as Mother's Day (1980), Blood Hook (1986) and Klown Kamp Massacre (2012), so I wouldn't say I have a complete animosity towards the studio and it's this willing to try out a few of their movies that have me seeing Father's Day (2011), a supposed spin-off to the aforementioned Mother's Day, with hopes that Troma can, once again, wow me with their perspective of a fun, low-budget horror trash.

Spoilers: it didn't. It's mostly trash.

For the first hour or so, Father's Day (2011) plays out as a homage to 70s action horror exploitation flicks, revolving around a man named Ahab hunting a notorious serial-rapist/murderer, Chris Fuchman, who appears to target only fathers. It's a vendetta he's holding on against the seemingly uncatchable monster after Fuchman murdered his father as a child, leaving him missing an eye, as well as him and his sister orphans. Now, it appears the murderous rapist has returned when murdered fathers start popping up across the city once again, prompting Ahab to seek help from an eager (and gay) priest John and a gay street hustler named Twink to finally him kill this scum once and for all. What these trio doesn't know, unfortunately, is that this personal vendetta will soon escalates to supernatural proportions as the fate of the world will soon be on stake.

Nasty murders, male-on-male rapes, some cheesy psuedo-grindhouse grit, and one unsettling killer, all rolled into one strange but thrilling slasher-revenge hybrid in vein of Death Wish (1974) meets Drive Angry (2011), Father's Day (2011) was looking like it's going to be way above the usual over-the-top mindlessness that the studio is known for, almost dead-on being a horrible yet decently executed exploitation tribute. But it isn't long before the plot devolves into the typical Troma shlock of bad taste hammy horror and it comes right after when the killer himself got murdered. Murdered, yet still menacing our vigilantes, now from beyond the grave!

In all honesty, this twist in the direction isn't entirely bad as it still have some good horror visuals and a share of funny moments like the obvious Star Wars throwback where a captured character is taken prisoner by a completely obese monster, or the fact that our heroes have to commit suicide ala Russian roulette in order to get into Hell (or Heaven) to fight off the now demonic killer. What went wrong for me here is that things just got more and more silly by the minute, with the sheer randomness of this journey into the underworld getting too outrageous for its own good that it lost most of the raw charm built when the story still have a serious side, genuinely making its horror elements felt overwhelmingly lost in this climax. Watching this mess simply gave me a headache for how unfunny it all become at the end that I think water and a Tylenol wouldn't ease up my brain after watching the damn thing. A real shame, honestly. 

Well, for me at least.

It's a Troma fan's wet dream, I can assure you that, so if you're one then you can expect great things from Father's Day (2011). For everybody else, it's your call: I am, again, just one guy who has its own taste for exploitation films so what works for one rabid horror fan may not work with this rabid horror fan. I can genuinely say that this is a fair enough movie that does a lot of things right, while the rest of it simply didn't appeal to me. I came to see it out of curiosity and it nearly gave me a tumor the size of a bowling ball in my head at the near end, but, if yer up to it, it's purely watchable. So until then, I'm gonna rest my noggin' for a while as, I swear to God and Buddy Jesus, that tumor's singing in my head again...

Bodycount:
1 male seen being butchered
1 male ran over by a car and shot
1 male set ablaze (flashback)
1 male had his neck bitten open
1 blind male found beheaded
1 male raped, disemboweled
1 female gets a shotgun shot to her chest
1 female beheaded with chainsaw
2 females found with throat slits
1 male and 1 female found murdered
1 female found with missing eyes
1 male shot on the head with a shotgun
1 male found tortured, left for dead
1 male beaten on the head with brick, stomped on
1 male shot to death with a machine gun
1 male had his head shot off
1 male decapitated with a sword
3 males commit suicide through Russian roulette
1 demon baby stomped to death
Total: 23