Tusk (2014)

“Tusk” cannot be unseen or flushed away. It deserves both. Pitched I suppose as a spoof on the “Human Centipede” flicks, once-talent Kevin Smith directs with the urgency of a fatty waving off farts as he sits alone on his watching bad TV. Justin Long plays a shock jock who gets kidnapped by a Canadian madman (Michael Parks) with a fetish for walruses. Yes, walruses. So, poor Long becomes a walrus. Yeah, Tusks in his mouth. Flippers. Funny mustache. Bodily morphed like the teens in “Centipede.” But it’s the audience eating shit here. Smith spoons it. Satirizing an OTT satire is a bad idea. Smith is all bad ideas. Halfway in, he drops in Johnny Depp as a redneck Canadian Inspector Clouseau hunting Parks’ psycho in a side plot that stops the film dead. Jokes about Canadian accents (!!) abound. (Are those still funny?) The tonal shift is so bewildering and Depp’s “performance” so wink-wink self-aware, it’s as if Smith is testing his most loyal fans’ patience: “Can you believe this shit!?!” Long gives his all. As a BFF, watch the lights go out in Haley Joel Osment’s eyes. Career panic. I can’t say Depp even cares. D-

The Human Centipede (2010)

Filmmaker Tom Six once made a joke of sewing a child-rapist perv’s mouth to a truck driver’s ass. Get it: When the fat hauler would crap, perv dude would get a meal. Somehow that crack, so to speak, gave Six the idea to make a horror movie about a whacky Nazi-inspired surgeon (Dieter Laser) who sews three youth (Ashley Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, and Akihiro Kitamura) together end to end, with the guy first in line. The whole affair is grisly, gross, and warped beyond measure, but Six smartly puts much of the gore and ick off screen and –- in a sly joke that somewhat backfires -- makes the mad doc the most boring horror villain one can imagine. This all comes apart, so to speak again, at the end when fat cops come knocking and the entire medical ordeal finally unravels as beyond preposterous: Mainly hydration and oxygen. There’s too little thrill here, the “Watch your back or else!” joke that forms the “Friday the 13^th” or “Elm Street” series, however campy they might be. It’s all just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  Again, so to speak. B