The Skulls
(DIRECTED BY ROB COHEN; STARRING JOSHUA JACKSON, PAUL WALKER; 2000)
I would give a great deal to be able to see The Skulls on opening night in New Haven in a movie theater full of Yale students, with gales of laughter rolling at the screen. It isn’t a comedy, but that won’t stop anyone. The Skulls is one of the great howlers, a film that bears comparison, yes, with The Greek Tycoon or even The Scarlet Letter. It’s so ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur. It’s in a category by itself.
The movie claims to rip the lid off a secret campus society named the Skulls, which is obviously inspired by the Yale society known as Skull and Bones. The real Skull and Bones has existed for two centuries and has counted presidents, tycoons, and CIA founders among its alumni. Membership was an honor—until now. After seeing this movie, members are likely to sneak out of the theater through the lavatory windows.
The story: Luke McNamara (Joshua Jackson) attends a university that is never mentioned by name. (Clues: It is in New Haven and has a lot of big Y’s painted on its walls.) He is a townie, rides a bike, lost his father when he was one, is poor, works in the cafeteria. Yet he’s tapped for membership in the Skulls because he is a star on the varsity rowing crew.
Luke’s best friends are a black student journalist named Will Beck-ford (Hill Harper) and a rich girl named Chloe (Leslie Bibb). Luke secretly loves Chloe but keeps it a secret because “Chloe’s parents own a private jet, and I’ve never even been in a jet.” Another of Luke’s friends is Caleb Mandrake (Paul Walker), whose father, Litten (Craig T. Nelson) is a Supreme Court candidate. With soap opera names like Caleb and Litten Mandrake (and Sen. Ames Levritt), the film contains an enormous mystery, which is, why doesn’t Chloe have a last name? I suggest Worsthorne-Waugh.
Luke is tapped for the Skulls. This involves racing around campus to answer lots of ringing pay phones, after which he and the other new pledges are drugged, pass out, and awaken in coffins, ready to be reborn in their new lives. They go through “revealing ceremonies” inside the Skulls’ campus clubhouse, a Gothic monument so filled with vistas and arches and caverns and halls and pools and verandahs that Dracula would have something along these lines if he could afford it.
Mel Brooks said it’s good to be the king. It’s better to be a Skull. Luke and his fellow tappees find $10,000 in their ATM accounts (later they get $100,000 checks). Beautiful women are supplied after an induction ceremony. They all get new sports cars. The Skulls insignia is branded on their wrists with a red-hot iron, but they get shiny new wristwatches to cover the scar. I’m thinking, how secret is a society when hookers are hired for the pledge class? Do they wear those watches in the shower? In this litigious age, is it safe to drug undergraduates into unconsciousness?
Each Skull is given a key to the clubhouse and a rule book. “There’s a rule for all possible situations: they’re told. I want that book. Rule One: Don’t lose the rule book. Will, the journalist, steals Caleb’s key and rule book and sneaks inside the clubhouse, and (I am now revealing certain plot secrets) is later found to have hanged himself. But was it really suicide? Luke thinks Caleb might know, and can ask him, because the Skulls have a bonding ceremony in which new members are assigned soul mates. You are locked in an iron cage with your soul mate and lowered into a pit in the floor, at which time you can ask him anything you want, and he has to answer truthfully, while the other Skulls listen to the words echoing through the crypt.
Many powerful adult men still take the Skulls very seriously. Not only Judge Litten Mandrake but Sen. Ames Levritt (William Petersen), who are involved in a power struggle of their own. They put pressure on Luke to end his curiosity about Will’s death. The following dialogue occurs, which will have the New Haven audience baying with joy:
“This is your preacceptance to the law school of your choice.”
“I haven’t even applied yet.”
“Imagine that!”
Chloe is enlisted as Luke’s sidekick for some Hardy Boys capers, but soon Luke is subjected to a forcible psychiatric examination at the campus health clinic (no laughter here), and bundled off to a mental hospital where, so far-reaching is the influence of the Skulls, he is kept in a zombie state with drugs while the senator and the judge struggle over his future. Oh, and there’s a car chase scene. Oh, and a duel, in broad daylight, with all the Skulls watching, in an outdoor pavilion on the Skulls’ lawn that includes a marble platform apparently designed specifically for duels.
The real Skull and Bones numbers among its alumni former President Bush and his son. Of course, there’s no connection between Skull and Bones and the fictional Skulls. Still, the next time George W. has a press conference, a reporter should ask to see under his wristwatch. Only kidding.
Slackers
(DIRECTED BY DEWEY NICKS; STARRING DEVON SAWA, JASON SCHWARTZMAN; 2002)
Slackers is a dirty movie. Not a sexy, erotic, steamy, or even smutty movie, but a just plain dirty movie. It made me feel unclean, and I’m the guy who liked There’s Something About Mary and both American Pie movies. Oh, and Booty Call. This film knows no shame.
Consider a scene where the heroine’s roommate, interrupted while masturbating, continues even while a man she has never met is in the room. Consider a scene where the hero’s roommate sings a duet with a sock puppet on his penis. Consider a scene where we cut away from the hero and the heroine to join two roommates just long enough for a loud fart, and then cut back to the main story again.
And consider a scene where Mamie Van Doren, who is seventy-one years old, plays a hooker in a hospital bed who bares her breasts so that the movie’s horny creep can give them a sponge bath. On the day when I saw Slackers, there were many things I expected and even wanted to see in a movie, but I confess Mamie Van Doren’s breasts were not among them.
The movie is an exhausted retread of the old campus romance gag where the pretty girl almost believes the lies of the reprehensible schemer, instead of trusting the nice guy who loves her. The only originality the movie brings to this formula is to make it incomprehensible, through the lurching incompetence of its story structure. Details are labored while the big picture remains unpainted.
Slackers should not be confused with Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), a film that will be treasured long after this one has been turned into landfill. Slackers stars the previously blameless Devon Sawa (SLC Punk! Final Destination) and Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore) as rivals for the attention of the beautiful Angela (James King, who despite her name is definitely a girl). Schwartzman plays Ethan, campus geek; Sawa is Dave, a professional cheater and con man. Ethan obsesses over Angela and blackmails Sawa by threatening to expose his exam-cheating scheme. He demands that Dave “deliver” the girl to him.
This demand cannot be met for a number of reasons. One of them is that Ethan is comprehensively creepy (he not only has an Angela doll made from strands of her hair, but does things with it I will not tire you by describing). Another reason is that Angela falls for Dave. The plot requires Angela to temporarily be blinded to Ethan’s repulsiveness and to believe his lies about Dave. These goals are met by making Angela remarkably dense, and even then we don’t believe her.