Admittedly, the most innovative and clever aspect of David Arquette’s directorial debut The Tripper exists in its concept. This is a slasher film that you can describe as “(insert horror movie title) meets The War on Drugs”—because without it, it does play like any other slasher movie.
However, Arquette used it to his advantage: since he already had the typical slasher formula to cover the entire plot, he could just focus on making the individual scenes as ferociously fun as possible. The plot itself never goes any deeper than a hippie-hater dressing up as a famous hippie-hater and getting hands on. David Arquette came up with the idea during a Reggae party by imagining (probably while stoned) what would happen if a killer bursts out of the woods and kills all the dreadlocks present. That is, in a nutshell, the entire summary of The Tripper\'s bare Scooby-Doo narrative.
Okay—The villain is the typical masked killer, but he’s not wearing just any scary mask. The killer is an axe-wielding weirdo redneck in a Ronald Reagan costume, stalking a hippie music festival in the red woods of Santa Cruz. Immediately, the film is taking a slant by painting the conservative ex-president as a murderous right-wing lunatic. Sure, it’s someone else in a mask, but the image being portrayed is the same—for most of the movie, what we see is the figure of Ronald Reagan, chopping the heads of those he hated most.
So how does Arquette balance the bias? By making the hippies utterly and completely unlikable. Slasher audiences by default want to see the killer dispose some perfunctory characters anyway, so why not have the kills even more satisfying? As liberal as the film appears to be, there is no denying that it takes an infectious sense of glee in letting “The Tripper” teach those tree-hugging loonies some good ol’ Reaganomics. You can almost pick and choose your preference: is it awesome because it’s making fun of Reagan, or is it awesome because it has Reagan giving hippies what they deserve? Why not both?
Since the film has no real plot, Arquette is forced to pull fillers out of mostly uninteresting characters. Luckily, the setting allows him to experiment with them. The film almost got too scary when an Easy Rider-esque sequence depicts in first person what the ultimate bad trip would look like, when a psycho killer is chasing you while you’re tripping on LSD. The cast all plays up their scenes and look like they’re having their fun. It’s a fairly interesting selection of people. Jason Mewes is dead-on as the leader of our main ensemble (as if anyone can still question whether or not he can play a stoner convincingly), and rising cult hero Thomas Jane is hilarious in his cop role, who’s kind of a badass version of David Arquette’s Dewey character from Scream.
The humor is blatantly broad, sometimes embarrassingly so (Paul Reubens plays a foul-mouthed concert organizer, who at one point ends up covered in excrement). Occasionally, there are moments of wit; but most of the time you’ll find the jokes more wacky than political, no matter how often it brings up partisanship. It’s funny, of course, but it’s the kind of funny where you know you’re laughing just because it’s a serious topic stripped down to juvenility and made a fool of.
In other words, the film sounds like the basis for a throwaway Daily Show skit.
It doesn’t reinvent the genre, nor does it try to. It doesn’t even try to at least throw a nod to the old days and attempt to be scary. The gore looks great, but not too crazy to take over the film. Arquette seems to know his place and where his movie belongs, and nowadays that’s a welcomed comfort. The Tripper makes itself appealing to only two groups of patrons: 1) fans of dumb slashers, and 2) fans of drug culture films.
Exactly how funny do you find the idea of Ronald Reagan broadcasting the slogan “Just Say No!” as he stabs a flower child in the stomach to pull her guts out? Those of you who don’t trudge near those areas, you’ll get a chuckle out of the synopsis and walk away. The rest of us can comfortably slip The Tripper as the perfect segue in between viewings of Reefer Madness and Sleepaway Camp II. What can we say? It’s just ridiculously entertaining.
"The Tripper" opens April 20, 2007 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by David Arquette. Written by David Arquette, Joe Harris. Starring David Arquette, Jaime King, Jason Mewes, Lukas Haas, Paul Ruebens, Thomas Jane.
