The Greasy Strangler (2016)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) There are a few horror subgenres that seldom work well for me, and The Greasy Stranger seems intent on combining two of them. For one thing, it’s a horror/comedy, which often ends up making me wonder why I’m supposed to laugh at horrible people doing terrible things. Then there’s the aesthetics, which (as the title suggests) wallows in an oily mixture of grime and awkwardness. (If movies smelled, I wouldn’t want to see this one.) The story has to do with a serial-murdering father, his son and the woman that comes between them. Taking liberally from the deadpan Midwestern-gothic style of movies like Napoleon Dynamite and the ultra-gore of video nasties, The Greasy Strangler is a film that, on paper, looks sure to irritate any possible indulgence out of me. While I’m still not too fond of the final result, even I have to admit that the film occasionally works better than I thought. There’s an over-the-top nature to the result that sands off the edge of the gore, while the humour does get understandable after a while. The serial killer bit (slathered in grease, popping eyes out via strangulation, cleaning himself in a car wash) is overdone to the point of being almost funnier than gross. The Greasy Strangler is really not a movie for everyone and it certainly relies on that specificity in how it builds its story. It holds nothing back either in gratuitous nudity (male and female), gross moments and overall lack of morality. I was ultimately defeated by the too-nihilistic ending, but for the longest time, the film played better than I thought. Still, this is more of a one-time joke than a kind of film I’d like to see more often.