Fubar II (2010)

“The Mac, she’s a cruel mistress.”

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I reviewed Fubar on this site last year. You should know that I liked Fubar.

Yes, it is true.

I liked this mockumentary about two Albertan headbangers with the same kind of irrational intensity that drove me to purchase Piggy Puff pork rinds with my allowance money as an adolescent.

Wrong. Shameful. But magically delicious.

With Fubar II, David Lawrence and Paul Spence are back with the follow up to the low-budget Albertan film about two fictional head bangers Terry and Deaner.

It was good to see these walking, talking mullets again. For a while.

It was like visiting old friends from your home town at their crappy apartment with the weird smell. Then I was reminded by a line in Gross Point Blank about high school reunions. Fubar II was also “just as if everyone had swelled.”

I was reminded that beer and spirits are no one’s friend. Everyone looked puffy and tired.

The script was also puffy and tired. The beauty of the first Fubar movie was its simplicity. Both directed by Michael Dowse, the first Fubar was made with digital camcorders, maxed out credit cards, and I assume, recycled empties as funding.

I realized the fun of Fubar was, in fact, the incredibly earnest film student and director Farrel Mitchner (Gordon Skilling) who was looking to capture the head bangers’ subculture on film. While Farrel tries desperately to maintain his distance, like a wildlife photographer in a duck blind, he keeps getting pulled into the self-destructive duo’s lives.

There’s no Farrel as foil in Fubar II. Rather the action centres on two following their erstwhile friend Troy “Tron” McRae (Andrew Sparacino) out to Fort McMurray, Alberta to make big money in the oil sands. Tron has fallen on hard, destructive times, and looks like a cross between Grizzly Adams and John Wayne Gacy. However even in his howling, drug-addled downward spiral, Tron still manages to make fistfuls of cash in the “Mac.”

This story has a love triangle, suicide pacts, the ghost of Christmas past, workman’s compensation fraud and holiday miracles a-plenty. This movie is a crazy mess in the same way that Strange Brew is a crazy mess. Surreal, flying skunk dog-grade crazy.

It wasn’t all bad. It was sort of fun watching the pair Deaner and Terry destroy oil patch property and themselves in the frozen North. More fun still (for me) was the spending spree at West Edmonton Mall – a place where I spent much of my youth (and meagre cash). Then I just became weary.

I need to give special praise to Terra Hazelton who plays Trish, strip club bartender and oil patch village bicycle. She’s like just about every woman I graduated high school with. A pitch-perfect performance.

Fubar II is proof once again that I can’t and shouldn’t go home again. No tears, more beers. Here’s to you, dead Farrel.

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1 hour 25 minutes

Rated 18A for so much substance abuse you’ll feel poisonously hungover after the credits rolls