You'd be surprised how much mileage writer/director Kevin Smith managed to get out of the offbeat concept of turning Justin Long into a walrus.
Extrapolating from a concept that originated on one of his podcasts, Smith's Tusk is a horror fable about an egotistical podcaster named Wallace Bryton (Long) who's kidnapped, drugged and surgically transformed (by a deranged retiree named Howard Howe, played by veteran actor Michael Parks) into said creature whilst in the backwoods of Manitoba trying to gather content for his show.
From my full review:
Extrapolating from a concept that originated on one of his podcasts, Smith's Tusk is a horror fable about an egotistical podcaster named Wallace Bryton (Long) who's kidnapped, drugged and surgically transformed (by a deranged retiree named Howard Howe, played by veteran actor Michael Parks) into said creature whilst in the backwoods of Manitoba trying to gather content for his show.
From my full review:
3 out of 5. Despite its inherent goofiness and wayward attempts at humor, Tusk manages to strike a nerve with its disturbing take on the creature feature. But much of that success owes to Justin Long and Michael Parks, who rarely veer into parody with their performances. If Kevin Smith were to take a cue from them for his next stab at the genre, it's almost a certainty that the results would chill moviegoers to the bone. As it stands, this movie is still a worthwhile curiosity for fans — either of horror or of Kevin Smith — to seek out. You may even be surprised by how genuinely creepy it can be when it wants to.After drugging Wallace, Howard gets to work mutilating the podcaster's body; and the ensuing scenes between the two actors are positively chilling in the way they unfold, if not for their sheer grotesquerie then at least for Wallace's terrified reactions and the matter-of-fact approach Howard applies to his task (after all, Howard's done this 23 times before, so he's had plenty of time to hone his surgical technique). It's also during this time that Parks gets to paint Howard in somewhat of a more sympathetic light, revealing the character's painful history of child abuse and neglect that's led to his current mental state.
Nonetheless, this is a Kevin Smith film, and as he's wont to do, he's made sure to include humor where audiences might least expect it. Boiling down to a series of jokes about Canadian stereotypes, the comedy is hit-and-miss though, with the worst (if not most baffling) offender being an out-of-place Johnny Depp, who makes an incognito appearance (under layers of facial prosthetics) as a Québécois detective named Guy Lapointe.
Guy joins Teddy, along with Wallace's girlfriend, Ally (Genesis Rodriguez), in their search for Wallace, who's alerted them to his kidnapping through a couple of frantic voicemails (before losing his tongue, that is). But the way Depp quirkily meanders through his part plays in stark contrast to Rodriguez and Osment's otherwise straight-laced turns. Ultimately, the humor ends up feeling like a misguided detour on the way to the movie's endgame, which, when you think about it, is disturbing enough in its own right, considering the man behind it.