After you’ve been a film critic for a while, you can begin to lose sense of the lower bounds of what a film can be. You get comfortable with a certain level of competency – even a lot of egregious, irritating, and generally unlikeable movies are at least strung together in a somewhat workmanlike way.
I mean, my personal answer to that age old question – what’s the worst film ever made? – is Kevin Smith’s Red State, and I’m happy to admit that at least a third of the crew on that film appear to have had a vague idea what they were doing, even if Smith never did. The camera is always pointed in the right direction; the sound never cuts out; and the jokes, if unbearably glib, do have some kind of rhythm to them.
I know that all sounds like I’ve been served a plate of dogshit and I’m smiling cause it’s hot, but it’s not until you’ve been served cold dogshit that you really begin to appreciate how bad life can get.
Watch the trailer for Hot Bot here:
So here’s the thing: last weekend, I suddenly remembered about the existence of a pair of filmmakers called the Polish Brothers. Identical twins, they made a strange, New York Times-praised little oddity called Twin Falls Idaho in 1999. I’m not going to say Twin Falls holds up today, because it doesn’t – it’s painfully saccharine, the start of a blood-boilingly kooky phase in independent cinema that culminated in Zach Braff’s burning pile of wank, Garden State.
But it has some charm to it; some sense of voice. On release, it seemed to promise that, given the time and space, the Polish Brothers could become something. They were a pair of new quirky auteurs ready to rise to the top during a booming period in American indie cinema, and appeared custom-designed to succeed in a homogeneous scene that was already seeking to reward white middle-class Americans for peddling out their white, middle-class stories.
Sadly, by the time they did seem interested in taking on bigger budget fare with their sloping, uneven comedies they showed signs of significant creative wear and tear.
Yet after Twin Falls, the Polish Brothers spent the early thousands flirting with the studio system without ever fully committing to it. The mainstream called to them, but they showed little interest – instead, they spent their time instead making strange, John Sayles-indebted puzzle boxes like Jackpot and Northfolk.
Sadly, by the time they did seem interested in taking on bigger budget fare with sloping, uneven comedies like The Astronaut Farmer and The Smell Of Success, they showed signs of significant creative wear and tear. All that energy that made Twin Falls if not good then at least interesting had given out for flat, uninspired storytelling, and jokes that landed with ear-splitting thumps.
Watch the trailer for the Polish Brothers’ The Astronaut Farmer here:
But, as uneven and unsatisfying as both The Astronaut Farmer and The Smell Of Success are, they’re not bad. Not really. They are plates of shit you might be served at a Michelin-star restaurant; turds nestled around a minty, delicately arranged salad.
Consider then Hot Bot, the latest film from the Polish Brothers, available on Netflix now. It is the mountain to The Smell Of Success’ molehill. It is the terminal cancer diagnosis to The Astronaut Farmer’s stubbed toe. And it is a stunning reminder of just how utterly unwatchable cinema can get.
The mere existence of Hot Bot elevates the entire cinematic canon that has come before it. Every bad film you can think of, from Josh Trank’s disastrous Fantastic Four, to the chain clamped to poor Ben Affleck’s ankle, Gigli, have gone up slightly in value, dignified ever so slightly in comparison to this semen-splattered self-immolation.
I could try to spell out the plot of Hot Bot, but I’m not sure that there’d be much point. And in any case, it’s not the plot that makes the film about as easy to watch as raw footage of dental reconstruction; it’s something else; something far more insidious. Anyway, all you need to know is in the title.
Watch the trailer for Twin Falls Idaho here:
It’s obvious that the Polish Brothers were led to believe what their ailing career needed was a shot of pure adolescent sex – Hot Bot is one long hideously bad taste joke, about as nuanced and complex as those 14-year-old baiting “kiss compilations” crowding up Youtube. It opens with a brand of automaton offering to satisfy a reporter on national television, and only gets dumber and more insidious from there.
I watched it in my living room, my mouth agape, unable to tear myself from the alternatively dull and outrageously offensive horror unfurling in front of me. Halfway through, my roommate walked in. I think I would have recieved fewer questions if I told him I was watching a snuff film.
And yet I feel weirdly satisfied to have seen Hot Bot. By the time the final slimy, cold turd had gone down, I was renewed. Every so often, it’s important to reset. To realise that though films like Suicide Squad and From Justin To Kelly might be inept, they have at least some craft to them. Hot Bot, by comparison, is as craftless as it is possible to get. And in its messy, hideous, spunk-heavy nonsense, it has the power to realign the boundaries of cinema.
For more writing on cinema, read our thoughts on Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich here.
