Sometimes, it can seem like there’s a divide between audiences who worship at the temple of Important Cinema, and others who are fine with Multiplex Movies. However, for Jim Hoskins, the co-writer and director of the wildly weird and furiously filthy “The Greasy Strangler,” after many years of watching Serious Films, he came to realize that it was okay to be entertaining and loose too.
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“I came to see that serious films are not necessarily more profound than silly films… I got older, and as more shit happened in life (shit as in ‘eurgh, bad stuff’), the desire to be serious in my work diminished evermore. I realized that a good film can be any kind of film, as long as it is a pure expression of something genuine,” he recently wrote in a piece for The Talkhouse. “It needs to have some sincerity. Also, it’s bloody hard to make something fun, funny, imaginative and visually transgressive. It’s arguably less hard to make something with topical, socially important subject matter that carries a lot of emotional weight by association…
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“…The point is, I think people undervalue fun films. Films that aren’t trying to peddle a message. Films that dare to fuck around a bit. I don’t see why films that are irreverent or absurd are deemed less important than films that are really, really, really, really heavy,” he added.
And so, with that mind, he gathered up Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo, Gil Gex, Jesse Keen, and Joe David Walters for “The Greasy Strangler,” a movie about a love triangle between a father, his son and a woman that charms them both, and an inhuman maniac known as, you guessed it, the Greasy Strangler.
The film is now playing in limited release and you can get a taste of its distinctive brand of comedy with the exclusive clip below.