Review: Father’s Day (2011)

This is a difficult review to write. I’m a huge Troma fan—Tromatized at age twelve, after watching Dead Dudes in the House on Cinemax. So I followed Astron-6’s Father’s Day from the moment I first heard about it. I picked up the blu-ray from Troma’s table at a convention and recently got to viewing it.

With a heavy heart, I have to report that I was not as into it as I thought I’d be.

There’s a lot of good stuff going on, and Astron-6 is a crew I will be following, to be sure. The packaging, from the one sheets and posters to the blu-ray set, is fantastic. With multiple discs of features and shorts, plus a bonus CD containing 9 original songs from the movie, it really is a package worth supporting. And speaking of that CD, the music in the film is fantastic, both score and original songs.

The problem for me lies in the death scenes. And the indecisiveness of the movie, in general. I won’t delve too deep into the plot, but in short there’s an eye-patched vigilante, a male teenage prostitute and a young priest on the trail of a dude that kills dads. The death scenes fall into the excessive, trying-hard-to-gross-you-out, borderline offensive type that are usually reserved for the likes of Human Centipede 2. The rest of the movie, though, is in the campy, tongue-in-cheek comedic camp—Troma in every sense of the word.

And in grand Troma fashion, the comedic aspect is executed perfectly. The gore scenes are well done, technically, and they hit their intended targets: your gut. But I can’t help but feel the movie would have benefited from gore/death scenes that fit in more with the campy-ness of the rest of the film. More rock and less shock or something, I don’t know.

That is not to say the movie is not worth watching. It definitely is. I just didn’t feel it was the masterpiece I was expecting when I pressed play. Oh, and did I mention the tunes in the movie rule? Because they do.