As explained on their website, Broken Lizard is a five-person comedy filmmaking group “devoted to intense sunshine, Floridian deep tissue massage, and the advanced study of keeping it realism.” The quintet is most famous for “Super Troopers” but has also made comedies like “Beerfest,” “Club Dread,” “The Slammin’ Salmon,” and “Puddle Cruiser.”
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After returning for “Super Troopers 2” in 2018, the group—which comprises director Jay Chandrasekhar and writer/actors Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske— have returned once more for a new hunchback-in-love comedy called “Quasi.”
This new one features the same gang, Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan, Jay Chandrasekhar, and Erik Stolhanske, but also adds Adrianne Palicki as the damsel of the picture set in medieval times. Here’s the official synopsis:
A hapless hunchback yearns for love but finds himself in the middle of a murderous feud between the Pope and the king of France when each orders the hunchback to kill the other.
So, it’s silly, absurd, and very much in the wheelhouse of the Broken Lizard comedy. It probably doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and these guys sort of chug along doing their thing—never really making a substantial cultural dent these days, but still clearly making films that work for them and the studios’ profit margins—and so more power to them, honestly. They’ve found their niche and it works.
A Searchlight release, “Quasi,” won’t be going to theaters and instead streams on Hulu on April 20—part of Searchlight’s recent strategy to test the waters of just putting adult-centered films on streaming instead of a theatrical release. What kind of impact does that have on the landscape of theaters? That’s a question for another time. Watch the first trailer for “Quasi” below.
