HOLLYWOOD PICK:
At last, Victor Hugo can rest easy knowing the Super Troopers guys have made their own Quasimodo movie. In Quasi, the Broken Lizard troupe (Beer Fest, Club Dread) plucks the famous hunchback out of his bell tower and wedges him between the dueling conspiracies of a king and a pope in the 13th century.
Per usual, the five Broken Lizard members (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske) share the writing credit and the major roles, mostly in haughty, mewing, Renaissance Faire English accents. With all due respect to Quasi’s hump squishing and draconian torture, time may have slightly softened the quintet’s gross-out style, but the film’s good nature nearly carries it through 99 minutes without exhaustion.
Lemme never quite puts his stamp on the Quasi character (relative to his castmates, not Lon Chaney). But Chandrasekhar (King Guy) and Soter (Pope Cornelius) have a ball sophomorically riffing on an otherwise smart gag about their divine right’s absurdity.
Visually, Quasi rests cheaply between Drunk History and History of the World, Part II—it’s all goofy, anachronistic fun. We’ve all seen a crowd of Bostonians go nuts for “Sweet Caroline”; surely there’s room for a pub of medieval Frenchmen to boisterously belt “Frère Jacques.” Hulu.
