Evil Bong (2006)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) You get no points for guessing that Evil Bong is not a good movie. No points at all. You would even get negative points for hoping that it’s any good even after seeing that notorious schlockmeister Charles Band of Full Moon Features fame wrote and directed the film. Taking place deep into stoner humour subculture, Evil Bong begins once a nerdy young man moves into an apartment featuring, what else, an evil bong. The title device ends up being a portal to another dimension filled with demonic strippers and that’s probably all you really need to know about where it’s going. To be fair, there’s quite a bit of disarming silliness to the result: it’s a film about filmmakers indulging their id on behalf of a very specific audience, and it sort-of-works if you’re in an adjacent category. I’m at the opposite end of the stoner spectrum, but I find nearly anything with nudity and silly comedy to be tolerable, and I wasn’t expecting much more from the film’s pedigree. It is most assuredly not a horror film — despite the gore, the creatures are an unthreatening mix of rubber and CGI and the tone of the film is closer to Cheech and Chong (the latter of which even having a cameo here) than anything truly unsettling. If you’re not part of the stoner subculture, I’d probably suggest watching Evil Bong while doing something else: It’s borderline irritating as a full-attention kind of thing, but just interesting enough to be worth a quick look in-between other activities. There are now more than six sequels, but I’m not in a hurry to see any of them.