This is the End

This is the End – I will not write that This is the End (2013) is a funny picture.  Comedy is a matter of taste and people’s tolerances for gross-out humor vary.  So I will say that I thought This is the End was very funny.  The movie is amusing in a satisfyingly moronic sort of way and doesn’t overstay its welcome.  Although the last twenty minutes threatens to devolve into special effects mayhem, the picture hesitates and doesn’t exactly go over the top – the satanic monsters beleaguering our heroes have a distinctly second-hand cheesy appeal:  they are like magma versions of Ray Harryhausen creatures moving with a jerky stop-action gait.  As such, the hell-beasts don’t overwhelm the comedy which remains rather sweetly intact right through to the happy ending in paradise.  The premise of the picture is that Seth Rogen, playing a variation on himself, meets a friend, Jay Baruchel, at the airport.  The  two dudes hang-out at Rogen’s house, smoking dope and playing video-games, and, then, travel to James Franco’s place where a large party is underway.  The party is packed with lots of LA celebrities.  Unfortunately, the end of the world takes place before Franco’s party is done and, after Michael Cera is impaled on a light-pole and Aziz Ansari falls into the pit of hell sans one of his hands left clutching the ankles of a celeb that wouldn’t save him, the survivors hunker-down in the movie stars mansion.  The comedy arises from the hysterical eighth-grade girl shenanigans of the movie stars, all of whom seem wildly anxious about who exactly likes whom and the degree to which affection is expressed and reciprocated.  This socially observant humor is mingled with jokes about the comical ineptitude of the movie stars with respect to the simplest activities, their narcissism and self-absorption that, if anything, grows even more intense the more the fires of hell lick around their sanctuary, and various exuberant exchanges of insults – a particularly memorable flyting involves James Franco and Danny McBride debating when and where a guest has the right to ejaculate in the host’s home.  In effect, the film is an updating of those old horror-comedy pictures in which Abbott and Costello confronted the werewolf, Frankenstein’s monster, and Dracula – the humor lies in the mash-up of two seemingly inconsistent genres that are, in fact, revealed to be allied:  the terror and shame of bodily degradation in classical horror films is conspicuously kin to jokes about puke and “sharting” – shitting your pants while farting – that are the staples of modern gross-out humor.  Incontinence is funny when viewed in a certain light but horrible enough from another perspective.  Danny McBride is the best thing in the movie, particularly acting the part of the King of the Cannibals, a sort of gay version of the Humongus gang in the Road Warrior.  But James Franco, Jonah Hill, and Seth Rogen, together with the big black dude from The Office, Craig Robinson, are all amusing.