The world is full of confounding, inexplicable places. Some of those places happen to be suburban Denver, Colorado. Crocodile Dose, the debut feature by Jason Waters and his fucked up flock of stoners, is a monument to the suburb’s droll potential, full of hidden corners and mystical figures to lead you in, through, and out. If the film adheres to any kind of cinematic tradition — and there’s very little — it is in exploiting the perennial weirdness of suburban sprawl. Best friends Curtis (Chase Mackay) and Jimmy (Graham Cox) are home from college for the Summer. Jimmy wants to party, but Curtis isn’t feeling it after breaking up with his girlfriend, Jane. When Jimmy finally convinces him to come out anyways, their quest to complete a simple pre-party checklist (to procure drugs, booze, music, and bitches) turns into a full-blown suburban odyssey that will change the way Curtis sees himself and his life’s trajectory.
Crocodile Dose may be the most heterosexually inclined film on offer at Musclefest, a weekend of queer and transgressive film screenings hosted by Elizabeth Purcell’s distribution label Muscle Distribution at The Roxy Cinema in New York, but it feels at home amongst this new vanguard of cinematic voices just the same. A queering of the form any way you look at it, it’s no surprise to see Crocodile Dose amidst and embraced within a lineup more notable for its queer and trans films, like Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage, or Avalon Fast and Jilian Frank’s Drinking and Driving, which opened and closed the fest, respectively.
It’s difficult for this millennial writer to come up with the right words to describe what Crocodile Dose is doing, because its visual language speaks to and for a younger generation, one whose brains, for good and for bad, are the smoking remnants of a scorched earth campaign by memes, irony, and a general despairing over the state of a world they have no choice but to inherit. There are no clean lines, no crisp images, no dulcet tones on offer over its 70 minutes. Crocodile Dose feels like the result of someone cracking your head open and scooping out it’s gooey, still pulsating insides. Its images spill forth in a torrent, at times a montage and at others a collage, embracing first, third, double, triple, and overlapping perspectives with a manic generosity that builds up, dissolves, and reconfigures Curtis and Jimmy’s fragile relationship.
No sooner does one scene establish a reassuring shot/reverse shot logic than another arrives to introduce a selfie shot underneath Mackay’s chin — or a detached, voyeuristic leer while he buys a vape at a convenience store — interrupting, knocking it and the viewer off-balance. At one point, a vulnerable conversation between Curtis and a local drug dealer splits the screen where one would usually expect cuts. Viewers of a certain age will have seen this technique drawn out in Gaspar Noe’s Lux Æterna and Vortex, or Mike Figgis’ Timecode; here, it’s off-handed and casual. Pocket-sized digital cameras also impart an improvisatory, almost vlog-like sensibility onto the images (as does a winking deployment of rights-free muzak immediately recognizable from the earnest YouTube vlogs of this writer’s own era); and memeified MS Paint-like inserts interrupt every barely established rhythm.
Waters and his actors rely on this destabilizing approach more often than not. Their film is a resounding middle-finger to codified modes of filmic respectability, all the more stinging because it comes across so casually. This isn’t to say they haven’t put a great amount of effort into the film; the mind actually boggles over how many moving, individually constructed or rendered elements the viewer can gorge upon within the frame, and the extent to which Waters and his collaborators have embraced a hard-fought but necessary undercurrent of genuine sincerity. Theirs is a world of seemingly unreasonable truths, like Curtis’ upcoming summer internship, which makes him feel more adult than he actually is; or his recent break up with Jane, an earth-shattering event that has reduced him to a kind of hermit; or that he and Jimmy aren’t as compatible as friends as they once believed. Crocodile Dose is not a Zoomer manifesto — that would be too easy — but rather the natural extension of their generation’s ping-ponging, irony-pilled mode of thinking, and an earnestly mounted fight against it.
These adult realities encroach on Curtis and Jimmy’s childish utopia of cobbled-together comforts. Vapes, memes, and edibles numb them; an ironic (but maybe not ironic) outing to the video store lights up their eyes. A circuitous mission to find ketamine — which brings them into contact with a local amusement park, a gay rich kid who sits on his front lawn with a fake gun, a square in his 30s (his thigh-hugging short shorts and fratish shades announce him as nothing more than a millennial, for God’s sake), and a carton of matzah ball soup — is at once invigorating and demoralizing. And that’s before they realize that the ketamine is hidden somewhere in Jane’s house, that they’ll have to think of an excuse to find it, and that Curtis will probably try (and fail) to resist falling back into the easy rhythms of his dead relationship.
Waters is smart to understand the shorthand of the teen party comedy. Curtis and Jimmy’s checklist of party essentials is at once a crude map for its own winding narrative and a knowing wink to its more mainstream and palatable predecessors, like Superbad and Booksmart. But words alone can’t really do Crocodile Dose justice. In fact, I think it’s good that words fail to adequately describe what it feels like to watch it. If you’re more than 30 years old, this is a film that needs to be seen to be believed — not an answer to the age-old question of whether the kids are alright, but a jolt of youthful verve that elicits as many bemused giggles as it does earnest gasps.
DIRECTOR: Jason Waters; CAST: Chase Mackay, Graham Cox, Jason Waters, Avery Boggs, Owen Broghammer; DISTRIBUTOR: Muscle Distribution; IN THEATERS: November ddd; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 10 min.
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