Box-office gross-out

By GRAHAM REID

No big issue, okay, but here are some observations from a seat near the aisle: Scary Movie, which is packing the multiplexes and is the fifth biggest grossing movie in the States this year, starts with a fart joke. Later a man gets his head penetrated from ear to ear by a penis and there are jokes about, and simulations of, oral sex.

Big Momma's House opened with an remarkable display of flatulence by a woman with gastroenteritis.

Jim Carrey's Me Myself and Irene, directed by the Farrelly brothers who brought you Dumb and Dumber, included references to anal sex, erections, lactating women, dildos - and there's a man with a chicken shoved up his rear end.

In the sequel to Eddie Murphy's phenomenally successful The Nutty Professor, which has just started here, Ma Klump takes out her false teeth and goes ...

You can guess the rest.

All these are big grossing movies. And pretty big on the "eewww gross" front.

Scary Movie has out-grossed Scream 3, one of the genre which it parodies. Big Momma's House and that Nutty Professor sequel The Klumps have rocketed into the top 10 grossing movies in the States. Irene and Momma went top five here.

Because extreme violence barely raises a flicker of interest these days and truly distasteful stuff like Hollow Man (nasty enactments of rape and voyeurism) passes without a murmur, offensiveness appears to be the new frontier.

"Pushing the envelope in terms of sex is one way to shock the audience," says Susanne Daniels, Warner Brothers' entertainment president. She might have added bodily fluids and excretions as well.

Look around: the semen scene in There's Something About Mary, Austin Powers drinking diarrhoea in The Spy Who Shagged Me, Adam Sandler urinating in Big Daddy ... Gee, one of the characters on South Park is a pooh. Eewww, gross.

Some suggest there's nothing especially new in any of this, just that there's more of it.

Mel Brooks' cowboy parody Blazing Saddles in 1974 raised a small stink when bean-eatin' cowpokes relaxed their sphincters around the campfire. John Landis' 1978 lowbrow fraternity house comedy Animal House has become a cult favourite and, stupid though they were, there were seven Police Academy movies made from 1984 onward.

This is an irony-free area - much like Hollywood's America. "What sells today seems to be defined neither by irony nor by subversion, but by explicitness," says screenwriter Herschel Weingrod, who wrote Trading Places.

Some might cite the line from singer Bruce Cockburn at this point: "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse."

If normal was Blazing Saddles, the argument goes it got worse with Big Momma's House.

Perhaps if it wasn't for Brooks' parodies (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein) we would not have had the Zucker Brothers Airplane! and consequently no Scary Movie.

Of greater significance, however, is that the target demographic for Hollywood is moving relentlessly downward. Teenhood isn't just a phase that kids go through, it's a whole new market for exploitation. Appeal to them and you'll appeal to those who'll bankroll your project.

Kids like fart jokes, everyone laughs when the fat man falls over, oral sex is something you can talk about now because the president was caught with his pants down. We should remind ourselves the phrase "semen-stained dress" entered the public domain not through a gross-out movie but the nightly news.

Have Hollywood's morals gone down with Monica? If so, it's a blow for any parent trying to tell their 12-year-old who liked the Scream series why they can't see Scary Movie. Or will the kids who hooted through Nutty Professor see Ma Klump take out her false teeth? Do they want to?

That perhaps is the greater question: if movies are being made in this manner, who is driving it? "Money doesn't talk, it swears," said Bob Dylan. Now it's saying "poo-poo" and people are laughing it up.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses, said American journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken - wisdom that Hollywood movie comedy-writers now have as a screen-saver.

Whether such gross comedies are harmful is another matter. Many rightly point out it's not the end of the civilised world, but simply bad taste and low humour.
We've had a little of it here: our soon-to-be-most famous movie director Peter Jackson had a notable early outing called ... Bad Taste. And few would argue that Meet the Feebles gave Oscar Wilde a run for his money in the wit stakes.

Because we also know that trends in films are cyclical - you probably couldn't give away a Tarantino-inspired script in Hollywood today - then this kind of gross-outs will pass.

"I think we're at the end," says Peter Farrelly. "I don't want to keep going up and up. The more movies we make, the more they expect the unexpected. So now we have to veer off."

Already the Farrellys are working on what they call a gentle comedy with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Black comedian Chris Rock predicts Hollywood's current love of sleaze and raunch may have peaked. "I think there's going to be a backlash on the whole gross-out thing."

Rock says there's a reason Hollywood comedy is taking the low road - you don't have to be good.

"It's just like when I tell dirty jokes. The dirty jokes I can tell drunk - the clean jokes take a precision. It's like landing the space shuttle: you can end up on the pad or in the water."

But the audience will decide if vulgarity is just a phase that will pass. Hopefully, the kids these movies are aimed at will grow up and look for something more sophisticated, and actors will be left with a CV which says: "Can't sing, can't act ... can fart a little."