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Yoga Hosers, the second feature in the proposed True North trilogy, refers to the fact that the two main characters, both named Collen, like yoga (or at least writer/director Kevin Smith‘s grossly ignorant appropriation of yoga) and are hosers (Canada’s way of saying fool or dolt.) Convenient store clerks and high school students, the Colleens are frequently buried up to their eyeballs in their smartphones, snapping selfies, posting to the ‘gram and generally disengaging from the physical world around them. When an ancient army of foot-long Nazi sausage clones, called Bratzis, begins to attack their small Canadian town, the girls must put down their iPhones to save the day.

Before proceeding, go back and read that last sentence again. This is not a drill. Kevin Smith’s new movie is actually, seriously, factually about phallic Nazilings with concentrated sauerkraut for blood unleashing pint-sized hell on Smith’s shameless rendering of a Canadian town. Further, these Bratzis attack their unsuspecting prey by burrowing into their buttholes. You can’t make this stuff up.

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Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp should be charged with child abuse for making their daughters star in such horrible dreck as Yoga Hosers is from top to bottom an intolerable gag had at the expense of any audience caught off-guard and stuck watching it. Nothing short of a retarded Rubik’s cube of boorish ideas and even worse execution, Yoga Hosers is the product of juvenile podcast riffing presented a budget and let loose.

As the Collens, Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith and Depp’s daughter, Lily-Rose Melody Depp, are subject to the whims of daddies who’ve lost the plot. And though neither lives up to the atrocious horror that is Johnny Depp’s incredibly obnoxious Guy Lapointe, neither will likely survive a career outside of their parents’ looming shadows. Especially if they’re willing to debase themselves with such putrid material.

Another minute on Depp’s Guy LaPointe. Although Tusk didn’t quite earned the cult fandom that some could convincingly argue that it deserved, at least it was an extremely effective horror feature. Michael Parks was terrifying as a mad scientist who turns Justin Long (who features here as a deluded yoga instructor called Yogi Bayer) into a walrus. The creature design was nightmare-fuel made reality. And then there was Guy LaPointe, a parody of a character in an otherwise strong feature. Even with limited screen time, Guy LaPointe almost ruined Tusk. Now imagine an entire movie brimming with Guy LaPointe and his brainless caricature of a Canadian detective. Welcome to Yoga Hosers. I’m genuinely sorry you’re here.YogaHosersSSR3

Smith’s mockery of Canada is wanton; an unchecked, borderline xenophobic assault against their accents, lexicon and culture. There’s a smug satisfaction to the fact that the convenience store in which the Colleens work is called Eh 2 Zed or that it features the “World’s largest selection of artisanal maple syrups” and though Smith attempts to be cute or tongue-in-cheek while having a joke on our neighbors to the north, the result is one long-winded humorless prank. His lewd wielding of lame stereotypes as some bastion of high comedy is insulting, irritating and intolerable.

Following the release of Cop Out, Kevin Smith had a very public falling out with the critical community where he lambasted movie critics on social media. Said Smith, “So we let a bunch of people see a movie for free and they shit all over it?” It seems that six years later, Smith’s skin has only gotten thinner as one of the big plot reveals of the movie (and no, I don’t feel wrong spoiling this) is about an ex-Nazi scientist’s efforts to create a monster to “kill all the critics”. It’s almost as if he’s preemptively insulating himself from the inevitable backlash against this altogether defective “comedy”. At least us critics can take solace in the fact that Yoga Hosers is a really, really, really abominable movie.

CONCLUSION: A waste of time and money (but maybe not talent), ‘Yoga Hosers’ is no horror movie though it is a horror to behold. Obnoxious, putrid and loathsome, this cinematic garbage is one of the worst movies to ever come from the mind of Kevin Smith and an early contender for worst of the year.

F

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*Reprint of our 2016 Sundance review.

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