Hanky Panky

There is a style of comedy out there that I'm not sure has a name; I call it "internet comedy". It's a style of comedy inspired by the early 2000's web comics and Flash animation, as well as the animated shows on Adult Swim. It thrives on randomness, awkward pauses, pointless surrealism, and a general disdain for the set-up/punchline formula. You can trace its roots back to Monty Python, but internet humor is a little more troll-like in its execution. Python was deliberately weird and obtuse, but it was also strategic in its use of absurdism. Internet humor's absurdism is random and inchoate by design. This sense of humor has spawned many a movie, especially in the low-budget indie scene. Some filmmakers understand how to marry that style with their low-budget and use this synthesis to their advantage. Hundreds Of Beavers gained widespread acclaim, and in my opinion rightfully so. The Velocipastor also became a cult sensation. There is no magic formula, though; Catnado tried and failed, miserably. Which is where Hanky Panky, regrettably, comes in. Hanky Panky is not as amateurish as Catnado, I'll give it that. But we're talking very minor degrees of separation here. Degrees measured by electron microscopes. The idea of Hanky Panky is thusly: a socially awkward man gets invited to a cabin by mistake to participate in an intervention for a marriage. This man has a sentient talking handkerchief. While at this cabin, they discover there is an equally sentient killer hat looking to take over the world. I don't know that even in the right hands that this premise would have enough meat on the bone to get to feature length, but I can sure as hell tell you that in these hands, it didn't have enough to get to fifteen minutes. It is wholly, and I do mean wholly, reliant on that Internet Humor style. If you don't find awkwardness and random pauses and nonsensical concepts funny, you won't like this. Period. I can appreciate it when done well. I mentioned two movies already where I think that style of humor works. I still get excited when I see a new video from Homestar Runner. But Hanky Panky learned all the wrong lessons from that. It is not enough to just be random. For instance, characters. Good Internet Humor still invests in characters, even if they're weird. The main character of Hundreds Of Beavers is given, through a clever if insane script, purpose and sympathetic aspects by his quests and his love for The Furrier. The characters of Homestar Runner have unique, defined personalities and quirks that make them endearing. Hell, even a character like Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force is enjoyable because his abrasiveness and egotism are leavened by always being wrong and bring transparently full of shit. The characters of Hanky Panky have no redeeming traits. They're abrasive or weird or incoherent for the sake of being that trait. Carla is a miserable bully and an alcoholic. SO FUNNY. There's a guy who is supposed to be a doctor -- of what, I can't recall -- who speaks with an accent that is both outrageous and muddled, and is obsessed with haute couture. SUCH COMEDY STYLINGS. Diane is the cartoon stereotype of a crunchy granola hippie. MY SIDES ACHE FROM ALL THIS LAUGHTER. There's a character who is only around for 10 minutes who dresses and acts like she's a 1940's Hollywood movie star, but she also has a second face growing out of the back of her skull. This is never given any explanation or purpose in the movie, and she's killed shortly thereafter, rendering her character's quirks pointless. That's this movie's idea of comedy in a nutshell. I'm not about to say this movie could've been improved with better cinematography and direction, but it could've livened things up some if there was some style to it. And before anybody says "they're low-budget, they have limitations", I again point to the comparable movies I mentioned before and say that if Beavers and Velocipastor could pull it off, there's no reason Hanky Panky can't. Lean into the low-budget aspect. Camp it up. Turn a liability into an asset. I damned near popped out a rib in the scene from Velocipastor where we finally see the title character turn into the dinosaur during the big fight with the ninjas, and it's a $25 Spirit Halloween inflatable T. rex costume, but he's kicking ass like Bruce Lee. Or when Elvira's Haunted Houses has a terrible special effect at the end of the castle crumbling, and when Elvira (the character in the movie) celebrates as she sees it, she says it's because they could afford such an awesome special effect. That's the kind of aesthetic this movie should be leaning in to with all its weight. Instead, Hanky Panky hides its low budget by doing nothing at all. It doesn't attempt to hide that it's low-budget, it just hopes that by omitting any ambition whatsoever, you won't mind. Yeah, you'd be wrong about that, movie. "We can't achieve it, so why try" isn't a clever workaround, and it sure as hell isn't subversive. It highlights how little effort was put into this beyond the elevator pitch. There was a way Hanky Panky could've been fun, and at every step, the makers settled for the worst option. There is no cleverness in the filmmaking, no embracing of the absurdity, and no enjoyable characters. It is an endless barrage of a style of humor that requires a delicate touch, which these people did not have at all. By thirty minutes, I was tired of this movie. By sixty, I was numb. And by the end, I was angry.