Starring Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, Amy Groening, Garrett Hnatiuk, Brent Neale, Kevin Anderson, Meredith Sweeney, Zsuzsi, Lloyd Kaufman, Mackenzie Murdock, Billy Sadoo, Falcon Van Der Baek
Directed by Astron-6 (Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Steven Kostanski, Conor Sweeney)
Expectations: High, this is supposedly nothing but awesome.
On the general scale:
On the B-movie scale:
Oh, Father’s Day, I want to love you. The hype surrounding you was so great, and I thought for sure you’d live up to it. Unfortunately, it never crossed my mind that you would fall into the trap that so many modern exploitation movies fall into: you’re more of a style reproduction than an actually good movie. Oh well. I hate to say it, but Father’s Day is not the genre revolution I expected, it’s just another in a long line of wannabes. Father’s Day does set itself apart from the generic crowd of retro-inspired films, though, by actually being low-budget and full of money-stretching ingenuity; I just wish it added up to more than what I got.
The story of Father’s Day is not one that holds up to scrutiny, and it feels almost like it was made up as shooting went along. It kind of begins as a serial killer horror film, with “The Father’s Day Killer” dismembering, eating and having necrophilic fellatio from his current victim’s severed head. If nothing else, this opening certainly sets a tone. Anyway, I say it “kind of begins” because this is more setup than anything else, as Father’s Day isn’t really a “hunt the serial killer” movie, it’s first and foremost a deranged comedy. At times it’s also a simple exploitation film, and at other times it’s a wildly imaginative fantasy. To label this as one specific genre is doing it a disservice, though, as it’s really a kitchen-sink type of film.