Very Bad Things [DVD]

Description

Product Description Laura (Cameron Diaz) and Kyle (Jon Favreau) are a happy couple, about to celebrate the wedding of their dreams. To help set them off in style, Kyle's buddies organise a stag night that turns out to be unforgettable - for all the wrong reasons. During the debauched festivities, a young stripper is killed and rather than going to the police, Kyle is convinced that he should dispose of the body in the desert. This sets off a chain of events which spirals out of Kyle's control. Hardly the best preparation for the most important day of his life. From .co.uk Peter Berg's dark comedy about a bachelor party gone horribly awry is highly ambitious in its attempts to satirise suburbia, male bonding, and self-help philosophy, and for the most part it does succeed in hitting its targets with a malicious, misanthropic glee. When five buddies arrive in Las Vegas for some pre-wedding shenanigans, things quickly spiral out of control when the requisite prostitute falls victim to a grisly accident, igniting a spark in an already unstable powder keg of personalities. Following the lead of real estate agent and self-help guy Robert (Christian Slater), the men warily agree on a cover-up and covert desert burial. A couple hours and another corpse later, however, they're already at each other's throats, and their escalating breakdowns threaten to disrupt the highly prized wedding of hard-as-nails bride Laura (a stunning Cameron Diaz). Berg, like most actor-turned-directors (this is The Last Seduction star's filmmaking debut) helms the film with a wildly sliding tone and tends to weigh its strengths heavily on its performers. Slater's psycho turn is by far his most inventive yet (he's more in control than ever before), Diaz effectively mixes sunshine with poison, and Jon Favreau is effective and understated as the hapless bridegroom; the rest of the cast, however, tends to play up the histrionics. Be warned, though: Those expecting a sunny-style There's Something About Mary gross-out comedy will probably be shocked by Berg's take-no-prisoners agenda; this is comedy at its absolute blackest, and no one is spared. --Mark Englehart