I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

My 2012 Choice For The Weirdest, Most Bizarre Film You Will Ever See



Rubber (2010) France

All right, all right - this movie was on my list of movies I would never EVER see much less review but hey, what could possibly be worse than all the foreign garbage I've been coming across lately? Oh, wait, this is foreign too - although it claims to be located in California. Yes people, this is THE movie about a TIRE that KILLS PEOPLE with PSYCHIC POWERS. Yes, it's THAT movie. And Garrett Morris says he won't do any more announcements for me so I can't make it any louder than that. With catch phrases like 'Careful Where You Tread' and 'Are You Tired Of The Expected' it was like it was daring me to watch it. Now this was made to be American by the French and they didn't do too bad, except in the lingo department they slipped a couple of times - a boy tells his father there's no school because he's 'on holidays', the head deputy says about the tire that they're going to 'nick' it,  and the father keeps calling the kid's claims that the tire is alive 'rubbish'. Sorry Europeans, we American folk just don't talk that way, but good show, good show.

To call this movie bizarre, beyond the pale, freaky or just insane isn't quite strong enough - this movie blew my mind. Oh wait a minute, that's what it was about (duh). Okay this is my husband's joke so I apologize in advance: What do you do with 365 used rubbers? Make a tire and call it a Goodyear. Ick. No joke folks, this entire movie is based on a brandless, rimless tire that somehow gains consciousness and terrorizes, well, a relatively small area. And it starts just as bizarre as it continues:

We see a gravel road in the middle of what I guess is the California desert. It is randomly covered with plain wooden chairs and we see a man on a bicycle with a ton of binoculars with him. Down the road comes a police car, which swerves down the road knocking over and destroying every single chair. When it gets to the camera, the trunk opens, the head deputy gets out of it, gets a glass of water from the driver and begins his speech - something about why Spielberg made ET brown and a bunch of other unrelated garbage and has this simplified answer: no reason. So this movie is 'an homage' to 'no reason'. And that's all the explanation you're going to get. He then gets back in the trunk and the car drives away. We then see a group of people complaining about the chairs being destroyed 'cause they could have used those, and the nerd on the bicycle gives each person a set of binoculars and tells them it's about to start. One teenage girl asks 'is it going to be in color or black and white?'. Yes folks, it's going to be just that dumb. But the movie can't start until the 'spectators' are ready to watch so...

As usual with movies of this, uh, caliber I took waaay too many notes. I couldn't help it, the jokes are very very loose, this movie-that's-not-really-a-movie had a lot of little tidbits in it that I found funny (or confusing, depending on how much whiskey I'd had) that I found I had covered two whole pages in writing. Can't read any of it, but boy did I write up a storm. I'll try and mash it down a bit: A tire sloowly finds itself, uh, sentient? It begins its journey, the spectators watching everything. It tries its powers out on inanimate items then small animals. Then we move on to people's heads. Just the heads. For some reason, this movie can't end while there are spectators (then why are they there.... oh yeah, no reason). So the nerd on the bicycle cooks a turkey and throws it on the ground and the ravenous spectators (except for one in a wheelchair) eat it up. It's poisoned, so they die, story ends. Movie over. The policeman who gave the speech at the beginning dismisses everyone to go home, good job - until they find out they have one spectator left. Damn. The movie has to continue. Why? Say it with me... NO REASON.

The nerd tries to get the man in the wheelchair to eat all kinds of goodies then, maybe just wanting out of the movie, tells unrelated stories of his evil childhood as he scarfs down the delicacies, and dies in agony. Meanwhile, the police have the tire cornered in a motel, trying to lure it out with a dummy with dynamite attached to its back (See the problem here?). The lone spectator has had enough and wheels down to the scene to argue with the head cop that the movie makes no sense, is going nowhere and what they're trying to do won't work. Sure enough, the tire comes out but explodes the dummy's head only (no big badda boom) and the spectator says, 'See?' 

The head cop, disgusted and wanting out of this movie himself, takes a big gun, goes into the room with the tire, you hear shots and he comes out with a strip of shredded rubber. He throws it at the spectator's feet saying 'There, tire's dead, movie's over, goodbye.' And leaves. But out of the room comes (please don't ask) a tricycle. The spectator tries to get the policemen's attention but they're long gone. The tricycle comes for the spectator who tries to tell it he's not part of the movie - but the tricycle blows him clean off the face of the earth anyway. Much MUCH more powerful in his new, uh, incarnation. And everyone goes home as the tricycle travels down the road, and every tire it passes gets up and follows it to Hollywood to, I dunno, raise the intelligence level there a bit?

Don't watch for a story, don't watch necessarily for a laugh - do watch if you want to see just how weird one can get with a dumb enough idea combined with a lot of interesting little ideas to make one big sloppy mess of a movie.