'Tusk' and Kevin Smith's Brief, Bloody Rebellion

By Lisa Laman | Film | September 9, 2024 |

By Lisa Laman | Film | September 9, 2024 |

Ten years ago, in September 2014, you could walk into a movie theater and watch Justin Long thrash around encased inside a ramshackle walrus form on the big screen, just as God intended. This was not a cutesy walrus form, either. Blood-stained seams were apparent on this organism. Pain filled every inch of its pupils. Deranged loner Howard Howe’s (Michael Parks) dream of turning a man into a walrus resulted in one of the most unnerving creations to grace 2014 cinema. Tusk was a strikingly cruel creation, especially considering it hailed from writer/director Kevin Smith. The man who penned the phrase “snoochie booches” had traded in slacker comedy for body horror.

Ten years later, Tusk, as well as his darker 2011 directorial effort Red State, stand out as abnormalities in a filmography unabashedly focused on comedy and weed jokes. They were oddities back in the early 2010s, thanks to how heavily they departed from Smith’s oeuvre, characterized by films like Mallrats and Chasing Amy. After Tusk, Smith returned to his indie comedy domain. For just a moment, though, Tusk suggested Smith was going full-on weird full-time. It didn’t last, but such fleeting strangeness vividly captures the bizarre place Smith occupied in the early 2010s.

At the dawn of the 2010s, Smith was in a fragile place as an artist. His 2008 film Zack and Miri Make a Porno is today considered one of his sweeter features, an amusing mixture of raunch and rom-com charm. In its initial theatrical release, though, Zack and Miri bombed hard enough at the box office to send Smith’s career careening in a new direction. Most notably, his relationship with Harvey Weinstein soured. The duo had worked together on movies for nearly 15 years. However, Smith’s perception that Weinstein dropped the ball on Zack and Miri’s marketing led to the disintegration of their relationship.

After this, Smith took some unexpected turns as an artist. This included directing a studio comedy (Cop Out) as a for-hire gig. He also returned to his fully independent roots with 2011’s Red State, which also saw him embracing the horror genre for the first time. Cop Out (a film Smith didn’t write) featured the kind of sex jokes and heavy profanity people expected from him. In sharp contrast, Red State and Tusk inhabited dark worlds reflective of a man frustrated with everything around him.

In Zack and Miri, even a social misunderstanding and months apart can’t prevent the two titular leads from falling in love. 1999’s Dogma saw the apocalypse narrowly averted and deceased hero Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) returning from the dead thanks to God’s good graces. Such happy endings were absent in Smith’s early 2010s movies. In Red State, nearly all the good guys (including the teenage boys the story initially followed) perish once the credits roll.

Tusk, meanwhile, wraps up with protagonist Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) stuck as a walrus at a local zoo. He cries at his confined existence and the realization that he’ll never reunite with the woman he loves. Even before that, the camera lingers on Bryton in immense suffering as pieces of his body are stripped away to make room for his walrus form. Potential savior detective Guy LaPointe (Johnny Depp) is a caricatured buffoon. Audiences can’t even turn to him for easy aid. Smith wasn’t just making quirky horror movies with a touch of his humor. These were bleak works (told with darker color palettes, dim lighting, and Red State’s shaky cam) devoid of easy heroes.

Such somber qualities parallel Smith’s frustrations with the film industry in this era. These issues were crystallized in a 2011 Sundance Film Festival speech where he chastised studio executives (sitting in the same room) for making an unsustainable business model for independent cinema. During this speech, Smith was unsure if he’d even encourage future young filmmakers to chase their dreams of making movies. Could the film industry even produce another Smith under its business model? From his point-of-view, Hollywood was Howard Howe twisting and contorting Smith’s Wallace Bryton. Smith’s relegation to the world of non-Miramax indie cinema was his equivalent of walrus Bryton’s confinement at the zoo.

Such pessimism informs Smith’s deep commitment to bleak tones, disturbing imagery, and nightmarish tones in Tusk. The resulting movie is a messy creation saddled with too many scenes focused on a blabbering Parks and Depp. However, Smith’s mindset in this era does inform a motion picture soaked in commitment. The irony and post-modern winks dominating earlier works are gone. Now Smith’s camera lingers on Parks dressing up as a walrus to fight walrus Bryton. Recreations of scenes from 1989’s Batman are absent.

It’s also a quality lending Tusk an edgier darkness compared to other early 2010s grim-dark features. In this era of theatrical cinema (especially in horror features), you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a movie priding itself on “gritty reality” and a subdued color scheme. This resulted in a slew of features deeply self-conscious about doing anything ridiculous. They also bombarded audiences with shaky-cam and drab-looking environments. It was a dark era for moviegoing that had no room for Joel Schumachers or Jamie Babbits. The Taken movies, Snow White & The Huntsman, or Exodus: Gods and Kings (among many other titles) were among the guilty culprits in such a draining cinematic trend.

These titles went bleak only because it “sounded marketable”. Smith, meanwhile, brewed his contempt for the modern film industry into works like Tusk. This lent them some specificity to their grimness. When it came to Tusk, Smith didn’t chicken out on depicting a man/walrus hybrid in all its twisted glory. This was not a case of turning Galactus into a cloud to make the character more “palatable.” Smith dared to combine ludicrous imagery with a downbeat tone, a rarity in buttoned-up gritty early 2010s cinema.

These creatively bravura qualities are deeply easy to admire. It’s especially effortless to appreciate Tusk’s greater facets given where Smith’s career went afterward. After this 2014 horror movie, Smith abandoned grim horror titles, save for the 2022 NFT anthology feature KillRoy was Here. Instead, he focused on deeply nostalgic sequels or continuations of his earlier works. 2016’s Yoga Hosers functioned as a spiritual follow-up to Tusk in a Canada-based collection of horror movies dubbed the True North trilogy. In execution, it went in a much sillier direction, heavy on Clerks references.

From there, Smith focused on projects that fit cozily into Hollywood’s favorite obsession: legacy sequels. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III graced movie theater screens from 2019 to 2022. Smith also tried relentlessly to get a Mallrats follow-up off the ground. More tonally audacious projects announced in the early 2010s, like his hockey feature Hit Somebody, went nowhere. Even if an episode of Smith’s SModcast podcast inspired Tusk, it was still a project largely devoid of references to earlier movies in the man’s filmography. Tusk functioned as a standalone work. That feat is even more apparent now that Smith returned to the Clerks world.

Smith has recently directed an original comedy again in the form of The 4:30 Movie. Perhaps Smith has finally purged his system of all those legacy sequels. Even if that’s true, it’s doubtful Smith will return to the dark horror days of Tusk anytime soon. The final True North trilogy entry, Moose Jaws, will almost certainly never see the light of day. The filmmaker is in a much more comfortable and peaceful place than he was in the early 2010s. In 2011, he’d regale the public with screeds about the unsustainability of the film industry. In 2019, Smith promoted Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back on Stephen Colbert with a yarn about how he embarrassed his daughter in front of her boyfriend thanks to his incessant weed smoking.

Smith is no longer feeling screwed over by the film industry. Now he has go-to financiers and distributors (like Saban Films) for his most recent works. That comfort ensures that the frustrations informing the bleak horror atmosphere of something like Tusk are unlikely to emerge again. In 2014, Tusk following up so closely on Red State signaled Smith was fully onboard with horror cinema. A decade later, though, this strange walrus saga is more a last hurrah for Smith’s darkest filmmaking era.

There are worse ways to go out when it comes to a brief flirtation with R-rated horror. Certainly, most other filmmakers would’ve shied away from even trying to execute a body horror feature fixated on a man becoming a walrus. Smith threw himself into the production with full force. This imbued Tusk with messy edges but also some truly strange imagery worth commending. Considering the quality of subsequent Smith projects like Yoga Hosers, it’s worth appreciating Tusk daring to ponder, to quote Howard Howe, “a riddle older than the Sphinx…[a] question which has plagued us since we first crawled from this Earth and stood erect in the sun. Is man, indeed, a walrus at heart?”

Lisa Laman is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic and freelance writer living both on the autism spectrum and in Texas.