FRIED BARRY (2020)

Studio:      Shudder
Director:    Ryan Kruger
Writer:      Ryan Kruger
Producer:  James C. Williamson, Ryan Kruger
Stars:     Gary Green, Chanelle de Jager, Bianka Hartenstein, Sedick Tassiem, Sean Cameron Michael, Jonathan Pienaar

Review Score:

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Summary:

While possessed by an extraterrestrial entity, a drug-addicted deadbeat takes a hallucinatory tour through the seedy streets of Cape Town.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

After walking out on his wife Suz and their son Bubby, drug-addicted deadbeat Barry shoots heroin with a fellow barfly. A UFO abducts Barry while he wanders Cape Town streets afterward. An alien entity possesses Barry and returns him to Earth as an odd mute who observes human behavior.

With bystanders reacting strangely to him everywhere he goes, Barry eats an entire bag of ecstasy at a dance club. Barry’s alien penis leaves a man mutilated when he tries performing oral sex on Barry in the bathroom. A woman takes Barry home for sex. Once he returns to the streets, Barry unintentionally chases a transvestite hooker who ends up struck by a car.

Barry has sex with a prostitute. Barry instantaneously impregnates the prostitute, who subsequently gives birth in front of Barry and her astonished pimp.

Suz finds Barry using alien abilities to heal a man having a heart attack on a sidewalk. Suz brings Barry home. Mimicking endearments he heard on television and in public, Barry speaks sweetly to Suz. With Barry apparently reformed, Suz renews their romantic relationship even though he still acts weirdly.

Suz rushes Barry to a hospital upon finding him suffering from sudden chills and a fever. However, Barry jumps out of Suz’s car, runs away, and collapses on a sidewalk.

Barry recovers with two tweakers who smoke crack with him. Barry later comes across a stabbed man asking for help, but Barry merely gives him a pair of headphones he found. Three thugs beat Barry unconscious.

A man called ‘Daddy’ captures Barry and imprisons him alongside a young girl held captive with other children. Noticing Barry’s regenerative abilities, Daddy uses pliers to painfully remove one of Barry’s teeth to see if it grows back. The next day, Barry escapes his restraints and rescues the girl. Daddy comes after them with a chainsaw. Barry kills Daddy with the chainsaw while the girl frees the other captive children. Cops arrive at the location and arrest Barry for Daddy’s crimes.

Since he won’t speak and can only be indentified as ‘John Doe,’ Barry is committed to a mental institution. Fellow patients Ronald and Martini organize an escape for Barry. Barry flees in a getaway car driven by Ronald’s contact Laurence, who gives Barry more drugs.

Back on the streets, Barry experiences more hallucinations. Barry sees Suz conducting a search for him, but he is unable to call out to her.

Barry knocks out an abusive pimp to rescue a prostitute, who turns out to be the woman he impregnated. The prostitute takes Barry home. The prostitute’s son is now a fully-grown Barry clone, although he is named Gene and still behaves like a child.

The prostitute rushes Barry to a hospital when he begins convulsing. Suz arrives in time to see Barry die following a doctor’s failed CPR attempt. Suz mourns over Barry’s body.

Barry suddenly resurrects. Suz realizes he isn’t the real Barry. Barry puts his hand on Suz’s forehead to transfer visions of the alien abduction.

The prostitute helps Suz sneak Barry out of the hospital. The two women take Barry back to the abduction spot, say their emotional goodbyes, and watch him ascend to a UFO. As the two women begin discussing how they know Barry, they hear him fall back to the ground behind them as his normal self.

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Review:

Even among crass comedies that thrive on irreverent antiheroes, audiences aren’t often asked to adopt a drug-addicted deadbeat dad as their humorously horrible guide through a strange sector of psychedelic sleaze cinema. But that’s Barry. And that’s “Fried Barry” too.

After walking out on his wife, shaking down a junkie who owes him money, and shooting heroin with a barfly who’s “a little bit racist,” Barry’s loser lifestyle gets a different kind of shot in the arm when a UFO abducts him. Returned to Earth possessed by an extraterrestrial entity, Barry now wanders the South African streets of Cape Town as a mostly mute observer. He still consumes copious amount of crack and ecstasy. But Barry’s hallucinatory tour through the city’s seedier side adds new itinerary items like impregnating prostitutes, being beaten by thugs, and escaping an asylum. Meanwhile, Barry’s alien hitchhiker silently wonders about the weird experiences and weirder people that somehow swirl together for unexpected misadventures in casual crime no matter where Barry goes.

You can tell that writer/director Ryan Kruger expanded “Fried Barry” from a previous short film. Not because the film feels like 10 minutes of content stretched to fit a feature length. This isn’t one of those situations. It’s because instead of a singular storyline, “Fried Barry” plays out episodically as a series of stream-of-consciousness vignettes. It’s like Kruger was constantly asking his cast and crew, “What should we do next?” before coming up with Barry’s next crazy encounter, which might be how filming actually went down since Kruger reportedly wrote scene breakdowns in three days and estimates 80% of the dialogue was improvised.

People hyperbolically say this all the time about various movies whether it’s true or not, but “Fried Barry” is a “love it or hate it” endeavor through and through. There’s a “film school” air to the atmosphere, not in terms of technical amateurism but in terms of “anything goes” experimentation. In addition to a scatterbrained style that reflects Barry’s muddled mindset, viewers who want to take the full “Fried Barry” ride have to vibe with eccentric editing, neon lighting, and staging fit for a manic EDM rave whenever Barry takes a drug-induced trip.

The movie is as politically incorrect as they come in a post-2020 climate, which means the reasons some viewers will laugh with “Fried Barry” will be identical to the reasons why other people will loathe it. Barry lives in a sideways world where nearly no one showers and almost everyone is some sort of scab on society. Gutter dwellers crossing Barry’s path include a wide range of tweakers, homeless panhandlers, neglectful parents, grocery store scammers, abusive pimps, transsexual hookers, kidnapped children, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, and hospital patients sh*tting on hallway floors.

What do these peculiar people get up to? Passing pipes and sharing needles, puking on sidewalks, stabbing hobos beneath bridges, monologuing about Mickey Mouse being inspired by blackface minstrel shows, performing countless bathroom blowjobs, and engaging in more sex than an average Brazzers video. Yes, “Fried Barry” is “filthy,” and your personal proclivities for tastelessness will dictate whether that word earns the adjective “delightfully” or “despicably.”

Is “Fried Barry” actually “about” anything? Highly doubtful. It’s not like Barry undergoes a transformative arc or like the film even follows anything close to a truly tangible plot. There’s a loose throughline where Barry sort of repairs his marriage through happenstance and incidental accidents. By and large however, “Fried Barry” is mainly a weirdo romp through and with slimeball scum.

I can picture myself on a secondhand couch as a college freshman, Natural Light in one hand and a Dixie cup of Old Crow in the other, yukking up a storm of juvenile amusement with likeminded buds at the silly shocks of spontaneous pregnancy and grown men breastfeeding. Twenty years removed from those days, “Fried Barry” has a harder time appealing to less prurient interests. Then again, when the film hit a mid-movie lull where Barry gets waylaid in a mental institution, I found myself longing to return to the street-level muck where “Fried Barry” finds its flavor. It isn’t ever pretty there, but at least it’s usually engaging in a “WTF?” way. 99 minutes in this underbelly will either turn out to be a revolting choice in entertainment options or be right up your urine-soaked alley, which is precisely the place “Fried Barry” fondly calls “home.”

Review Score: 50

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