Hanger - Now On DVD from Vicious Circle Films

Hanger is the sort of movie that you want to break out after your girlfriend forces you to sit through a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan marathon and then sends you to bed without a stitch of pussy. After an intolerably long visit with an all-too-happy-go-lucky co-worker or a prolonged holiday with a hopelessly wholesome relative, you need something grimy to cleanse the system of saccharine. That’s where the ouevre of Ryan Nicholson (Gutterballs) comes in.

Nicholson’s films are celebrations of filth, fetish, F-bombs and full-frontal nudity. And Hanger is the petulant, puerile piece de resistance, a movie so nauseating, nervy and bonkers that you may just develop a permanent case of lockjaw. In its first twenty-five minutes you’ve already seen more than you bargained for, no matter what kind of extreme cinema you think you’ve seen before. The whisker biscuit may never seem edible again after witnessing this film’s first act fiasco, from which the film gets its title.

Hanger concerns a character named Hanger (Imagine that) who survived an amateur abortion as a fetus but grew up deformed as a result of the botched job. Now, with the help of one of his deceased hooker mother’s much-beloved former-johns, he is learning how to be a man on his eighteenth birthday. And apparently that means getting laid, jerking off and killing any cruel motherfucker that crosses his plebian path.

Like some warped and cheekily preposterous poo-poo platter of Toxic Avenger, Gummo and This Boy’s Life, Hanger unfolds in dementedly hilarious detail as our innocent aborted man-child learns the ropes from a possibly retarded, possibly Asian freak-boy in overalls and his fellow mutants.

The sound is for shit which may be more of a boon than a bane as the resulting ADR work comes across in a seemingly deliberate Godzilla-like fashion, amusingly out of sync and anachronistic (many of the voices don’t even seem to fit the characters whose mouths they are coming out of). This is not to be taken seriously. This is Splatstick at its darkest and most entertaining, with a Jehovah’s Witness among the many sacred cows to be lead to cinematic slaughter. And when I say cow I mean cow literally and figuratively, as the Witness in question is of considerable girth.

Unlike many bloody exploitation bonanzas of this stripe, Hanger has a heart (albeit a lukewarm one at beast) beating in its brusque chest, a heart that beats with empathy and emotion instead of mere gore and amorality. Not that this is a requirement for the gore genre. In fact many would argue that it has no place in a movie of this sort at all, but those are the same ass wipes that get off on watching strangers simulate torture, so they are hardly the right people to judge. Hanger is imbued with sadness as well as stimulation and morals to go with its murder. And that is refreshing.

But if you’re one of those lug-heads who isn’t in touch with your feelings and just craves a well-rounded base experience of bad-assedness with a zesty helping of zany lines, Hanger’s got you too, with such zingers as, “Just made me feel good to know that you’d be wearing my load, kinda like a milk mustache.”

We used to have gross-out contests when I was a kid. Your friends would dare each other to do unappetizing shit in a bid to see who had the biggest balls. Now we recommend movies that we know will freak out the pussy in the bunch. If we judge modern horror based on this criteria Ryan Nicholson’s got some big, bloody balls. So like a good pair of furry dice, if you see a set of Ryan Nicholson titles, particularly Hanger, whip ‘em out and you’ll have a good time.

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