Casa de mi Padre (2012)

Casa de mi Padre (R)

"¿Por qué? ¿por qué no?"

Will Ferrell (Anchorman) is either loved or hated depending purely on personal taste.  However his comedic courage must be acknowledged as it goes way off track from Hollywood's standard comedy fare with Casa di mi Padre, a spoof on Mexican Violence Soap Operas. At 84 minutes, there are just enough long awkward pauses and sinister laughter to sustain the razor thin plot, a rural dispute between brothers and a local drug cartel.  This is a movie with one joke, a straight faced one where the terrible lines of dialogue and silly prop jokes are taken seriously by all involved.  Almost the entire movie (including Ferrell's lines) are in Spanish, and at times it feels like a one note SNL sketch gone terribly wrong/long.  Even the cast and crew seem bewildered that it ever actually got made, for it was made not to succeed but simply to exist.  It takes grande huevos to make a movie like that.

It is a project to be admired for it's insistence on being cheap, gaudy and hard to love, a lecherous puta who will spit in your face even as she takes your payment. Stick with it if you can, there are some real nuggets of gold mixed in with all the pyrite and prickly cactus.

5.5 Mannequin Love Scenes out of 10 (MEDICORE)