Bad Boy Bubby

I've never been more torn as to whether I liked or hated a film.

This plays like the evil twin of "Being There"—a cheaply-made film in which a deranged man-child, kept imprisoned in squalor and sexually abused by his mother for his entire life, escapes into urban Adelaide, and in a highly episodic series of events is taken, "Chance the gardener"-like, into various people's company, eventually fronting a rock band, and getting laid way more often than a babbling, homeless-looking person who can only repeat things he's heard said to him really ought to be, before ultimately stumbling into true love, all without being able to string together a single coherent sentence.

First off, this film has a lot of taboos—incest and animal cruelty, for starters, as he has sex with his mother and senselessly asphyxiates first his cat and then his parents with plastic wrap.

Then, the way he stumbles from adventure to adventure, and the way a whole parade of characters take this disheveled, obviously deranged lunatic into their trust as he stumbles across their paths, eventually turning him into a wildly popular lead singer of a rock band who wails dialogue from people who mistreated him earlier in the film into a microphone for an enthralled audience, is far beyond believable, as are the many women who show him love along the way and finally marriage. The whole thing requires more suspension of disbelief than any human could muster.

And then there's the sheer tedium of waiting for something to happen... this film takes its time going from place to place without going much of anywhere for a very long time.

And yet, there's something here. I can't put my finger on it. I can't defend it. But there's something about it... it's definitely not like anything else, that's for sure odd enough to perhaps compensate for its many failings, just on the strength of how freakin, well, different it is, all by itself.

I do notice it has a suprisingly high 7.3 stars on IMDB, with 16000 ratings and 121 reviews, got very high reviews on the festival circuit, and is apparently a cult favorite (which makes perfect sense to me)... so, somebody agrees with me that there's *something* about it beyond just a repulsive mess.

Weird.

I'm a little flummoxed, too, how there can be one world where so many people like this and everybody hates "Necropath".