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LUCKY
Produced by Steve Cuden, Michael Emanuel, Stephen Sustarsic, and James C. Ferguson
Directed by Steve Cuden
Written by Stephen Sustarsic
Edited by Timothy Stepich
Director of Photography - Byron WernerMillard - Michael Emanuel
Lucky (voice) - David Reivers
Misty - Piper ChachraneThere's a story I tell every so often about my first encounter with Jorg Buttgereit's NECROMANTIC. Having read Stanley Waiter's excellent essay in Cut: Horror Writer's on Horror Film regarding the 13 films he found to be the most disturbing of all time. On that list was Jorg's sickeningly vile Super 8 opus of necrophilia, dismemberment, and self-mutilation. My writing partner, Mitch Walrath, who up until this point had a reputation of being able to watch pretty much anything and not be affected due to a stomach forged of iron. About 20 or 30 minutes into the film, as the lead and his wife copulated with a rotting corpse, Mitch, looking a shade or two less green than a bowl of pea soup, couldn't it take anymore and turned off the television. Later that evening I went back to my college apartment and finished the movie, and its sequel, over a tin of potted meat and a half a bag of stale crackers.
Being able to finish the movie, something body builder Mitch wasn't able to do, actually made me feel like I had a pair. Well, let me rephrase that. I always felt I had a pair, and like any man trying to compensate I would brag about them often, only at that moment they resonated like giant brass bells atop a French monastery when they slapped my thigh as opposed to a water-logged sponge dropping against the bottom of the tub, as they had so much of my undersexed college days.
An hour into Steve Cuden's LUCKY, as cartoonist Millard Mudd is strangling to death Wendy, the liquor store check out girl, so he can rape her freshly dead corpse, I had to turn it off. My poor stomach just churned one too many times.
Granted, I felt like less of man than on those cold, pathetic nights in college when I wasn't able to get girls drunk enough to score, but at least I could breath again once the screen went black. And as any Pennsylvania coal miner will tell you, air is good.
Maybe I'm just getting soft in my old age. Or perhaps I'm not as objective an audience as I once was. Either way, I hope Mitch never read this review; the bastard will never let me live it down. And that's the embarrassing part, not that the movie was too much, but now manhood is in question again. Damn you, Steve Cuden, damn you to hell. I'm sending my shrinks bill straight to your office, buddy.
LUCKY is a darkly morbid character study of a cartoonist, Mudd, whose dead dog Lucky not only compels the man to kill, but also finishes his story lines and corrects his grammar. It's a not particularly graphic or gory movie, or even overtly funny in that thigh-slapper kind of way, but instead exhibits a dryly sardonic comic tone that subtly possesses the audience, interrupting their ability to distinguish between right and wrong, and has them find humor in the most horrible of human acts.
While LUCKY gleefully moons any who uphold common decency and good taste, it unleashes a nasty case guilt on viewers, and that's what did me in. I wasn't sickened so much by what the movie portrayed, or even how it was portrayed, but my reaction to it all. Just because you can laugh at something doesn't make it alright or safe, exactly the opposite. LUCKY is as dangerous as cinema can get simply because it can wring its audience into introspective puddles of self-doubt. Damn you Steve Cuden.