Local theatre luminary
Guy Sprung makes his feature film debut with The Hat Goes Wild.
Starring: Sarah Hansen, Monroe Black, Matthew Raudsepp, Vanessa Matsui, Mackenzie Rio Davis, Ryan Robertson Playing at: AMC Parents’ guide: language, drug use, violence. Some movies are best not taken too seriously. There are many levels of silliness to Montreal theatre veteran Guy Sprung’s fiction feature film debut The Hat Goes Wild. Borrowing liberally from horror and B-movies, it’s a campy, low-budget feature steeped in awkwardness, irony and bad dialogue.
The story revolves around a group of six CEGEP friends who get away for a weekend of canoe camping, where everything goes horribly wrong. Echoes of The Blair Witch Project are obvious, as the whole thing is shot in hand-held reality style by one of the characters, Suzanne (Sarah Hansen).
She captures the events of their weekend for a final project, using her straw hat as a dramatic thread in a half-baked idea about seeing “if it can actually enjoy nature,” and “if it can be changed” on the trip.
Things get off to a bad start as one of their crew, Mike (Ryan Robertson), hits on Cathy (Mackenzie Rio Davis) on the ride up, sparking the ire of her alpha-dog boyfriend Pierre (Matthew Raudsepp). A fight ensues and Mike gets left behind, shouting warnings into his cellphone as Pierre drives away. Bar- bara (Vanessa Matsui) tries to get Pierre to turn back, to no avail.
When the car runs over a turtle soon after, there are whispers of “bad karma.” Things get increasingly sketchy as they arrive at the park headquarters to pick up their canoes.
“There’s something weird about this place,” someone remarks.
Maybe it’s the creepy guy who greets them (Normand d’amour), or the turkey vultures flying overhead.
The bad omens accumulate; no sooner has Cathy confided a history of anti-depressants, abuse and an unwanted pregnancy than Mike severs a finger while chopping wood. The riotous sequence releases tension and sets the tone for things to come.
The turtle theme expands when, arriving at their campsite, a few of the kids begin beating on one. They are stopped by wisdom-speaking Sikh friend Angad (Monroe Black), who explains that, “In native mythology, turtles take messages between humans and the gods of the underworld.”
The film plunges playfully off the deep end when the camera briefly switches to a turtle’s eye view. But things get (relatively) serious as they discover a 10-kilo stash of cocaine among Mike’s belongings, and a body washes ashore in the morning. There will be more corpses before film’s end, along with instances of soul-searching and mettle-testing for all involved.
Too absurd to be taken at face value, The Hat Goes Wild is an enthusiastic excursion into genre cinema that doesn’t impress by conventional standards, but works more effectively as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to twisted, independent storytelling.