Amanda Davis

(Contains spoilers.) I would take the Saw movies and their endless blood and viscera any day before I’d sit through this nightmare fuel again. Kevin Smith’s 2014 movie Tusk is a disturbing comedy meets body horror story about a man who is abducted and surgically altered into a walrus, and follows his psychological devolution into a less-than-human abomination. An idea that could have worked well had it stuck to one genre ends up coming across as merely a confusing and shocking amalgamation of special effects, edgy humor, and philosophical queries. On one hand, this movie is absurd, right down to the premise—putting a person in a walrus suit and forcing them to flop around and bark is a laughable concept in itself. Now mix in plenty of jokes and a dash of attempted comic relief in the form of a Johnny Depp cameo, and you have the makings of an entertaining ironic comedy. But Tusk is almost impossible to laugh at, as I spent the majority of the movie (and hours afterward) sick to my stomach. It also attempts to be some sort of philosophical endeavor into the meaning of what it is to be human, and the psychological breakdown of a person being put through such an extreme and horrifying physical change. These elements are so overshadowed, though, by the absolute gross-out factor that the message just falls flat. And yet it’s too campy to truly be scary; the film is honestly just weird. I will give it this—I can’t stop thinking about it. So in being downright disturbing, it succeeds. I just feel it would have worked better had it leaned in a single direction rather than trying to be so much at once. I wish I could have laughed at this movie—I went into it with expectations of enjoying it as an oddball cult classic-type art piece. But God knows I never want to see that nasty, tongue-less pile of patchwork flesh pieces barking and screeching ever again, and I will undoubtedly be seeing Wallace the Walrus in my nightmares. The ending is another big issue I have with Tusk. I’ve never been one to scoff at ambiguous or unsatisfactory conclusions to stories, but this is just…confusing. Yes, I understand that some fiction requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but the mental gymnastics a person must do in order to accept the ending of this movie is totally unjustified. In what world would you find a severely mutilated kidnapping victim and put them in a zoo? As much as Kevin Smith wants me to believe that his antagonist has succeeded in completely blurring the lines between human and animal, I’m not buying it. I also feel it would have been more chilling to see, or even just contemplate, how Wallace could recover from what he’d experienced and what he would be like physically and mentally. But, no. The image I’m left with after enduring this 88 minute tragedy is a hideous human-faced walrus with a single tear rolling down its blubbery face. Honestly, a perfect mirror of what I looked like after finishing Tusk.