Jerkbeast

Dir: Brady Hall

2005

***

I don't know if you can consider yourself lucky if you lived in Seattle during the 1990s, I've never been and I don't know anyone from there, but I know what Public Access TV was and I am jealous of it and declare anyone who ever watched (and therefore could phone in) the late-night Jerkbeast show to be very lucky indeed. What a wonderful 90s thing Public Access TV was, sure anyone can now get themselves on the internet but getting yourself on, and indeed, doing anything you wanted on live TV seems like a distant dream. Having the ability to interact with viewers is next level stuff though and somehow Brady Hall, Calvin Reeder and Nathan Conrad dealt with a deluge of unoriginal and monotonous insults with style, wit and panache. Brady Hall's Jerkbeast, like one of the bigger characters from the Muppet show gone bad, was the king of comebacks, a silver-tongued monster who chewed up hecklers and spat them out effortlessly. When their show ceased to exist, the group focused on other projects but decided years later that Jerkbeast deserved a movie. It's not a polished movie that's for sure, but then it wouldn't really make any sense if it was. This should never have been a high-budget glossy picture, they came from Public Access TV and the quality of the film should reflect it, and reflect it it does. While Jerkbeast is in the film and is a main character, it isn't really about him - he needed to be the title though, because frankly without him, it's nothing. The film itself is about three guys; Jerkbeast who is a giant angry red thing, Sweet Benny who is like a child star of the 50s gone bad and Preston who likes smashing bunny rabbits with a hammer. The three meet and decide to form a band. The band gets popular after the release of their debut song 'Looks like Chocolate, tastes like sh*t' but poor representation and several changes of the band’s name lead to a succession of problems. In the end they decide on the name 'Steaming Wolf Penis' but by then it's too late, they've been fleeced and the age old story of a good band being destroyed by a big corporate music company plays out the way it always does. However, the band don't get back together in the film but they did play quite a few gigs in real life. They played a few gigs in the UK as part of a promotional tour they were doing for the Videosyncratic release of the film in the mid-00s, I was a couple of years late to the party and am still left with regret that I missed them. Everything about the film is of poor quality apart from the script and the performances, which are brilliant. Jerkbeast has to be one of the best characters ever to be committed to celluloid, there was nothing out there like him before and never will be again. It's about as cult as it gets, a homemade film that is genuinely worth watching, that seems to be enjoyed by everyone who stumbles across it.