Holla! If I Kill You (2004)

Directed by Mark and John Polonia
Written by John Polonia and Jeff Carroll
Starring
- Michael Troy Smith
- Mike Yard
- Wil Sylvince
- Arnold Acevedo
  Mia Amber Davis

Let’s consider the solid strikes this movie has against it, all readily apparent from the DVD cover:

It was directed by the Polonia Brothers, micro-budget filmmakers who have inflicted features on my eyeballs that were so unbelievably bad that I broke one of one of the rules of civility for reviewers and wished personal physical harm on them.
It’s an urban-themed feature, made by a couple of white guys.
It’s a horror-comedy. That means that, unlike a laughably poor horror movie, this one is trying to make you laugh.
It’s about a comedian who isn’t funny. I mean, even in the script. He’s failing because he isn’t funny.

“Whaddaya mean, ‘not funny’? Man, I OOZE funny!”

Given, then, how easily this movie could have been so bad that it violated the Geneva Conventions (even under the Bush Administration’s “relaxed” definitions), the Polonias can wear it as a badge of pride that watching it did not make me want to take off my shoe and beat the TV screen with it.

Does that means it’s good? Oh, hell no. But it wasn’t bad enough that I called down yet another curse on the entire Polonia clan and the horse they rode in on.

It is, furthermore, a very padded movie, with pointless in-betweener footage taking up enough time for it to stretch to the 75 minute mark. In fact, as is a danger in movies this bad, the filler footage often becomes more interesting than the story proper,as with the first five minutes of casual interviews with smalltime New York comedians and their experiences being booed. (No, you can’t start booing yet.)

Eventually, though, we’re forced to turn to the story at hand, which revolves around a young black comedian self-christened Hollaback (Michael Troy Smith) — young, but old enough to have been around a while. Holla is widely considered played out, though he’s desperately trying to show that he’s still got game. Now he’s being relegated by Mr. Fitz (Arnold Acevedo) to opening for Michael Africa (Kareem Green) — a comedian who used to open for Holla.

Talk about phoning in a performance.

And just to make matters worse, Holla gets a phone call from a mysterious black-clad stranger who threatens him to get better material and makes vaguely menacing oogah-boogah comments. (Question: Who gets all dressed up in their black identity-obscuring costume just to make a phone call? I’ll warrant that it’s hard to sound EE-vil if you’re sitting on your couch in happy-face boxers and bunny slippers, but those black gloves look thick enough to interfere with dialing.)

Just to prove he’s serious, the Phantom Stranger goes down to Fitz’ club, the Wanna Laugh Comedy Club, when it’s closed in the middle of the afternoon… and kills the janitor! (Note: No one will ever remark on the janitor’s disappearance. I guess in the absence of professional custodial help, comedy clubbers tend to clean up after themselves.)

So. Holla spends most of the afternoon sitting around, thinking of new material. Or past glories. Or something. After all, he’s thinking. That doesn’t make much of a sound. And boy, nothing says “gripping cinema” like watching someone sit around and think! He’s interrupted in his musings by Rose (Mia Amber Davis), his wanna-be girlfriend who won’t take “just friends” as an answer. I was searching for a term to describe Rose’s figure, when the movie kindly answered it for me in a phrase that one of the comedians uses toward an audience member: She’s “got the thickness.”

No sooner has Holla hung up on Rose, when he gets a call from the Phantom Stranger again — threatening him to get some new material. Of course, since nobody knows about the poor janitor, this ultimatum doesn’t carry any more weight than it did previously.

Plenty of thickness to go around, I think.

Eventually, as you no doubt knew, we have to get to the club. (As the MC proudly proclaims, “The Wanna Laugh Comedy Club, where if you wanna laugh, we got you.” Definitely a tagline that ranks up there with “Never underestimate the power of soup.” Or maybe “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”) And here’s where our descent into hell begins:

Nobody’s funny.

We’re graced with several opening acts, all of whom are young black comics performing for a young black audience. Of course, that means that they all go into ebonics overdrive, which, coupled with the poor miking, conspired to keep me from understanding one word in five. (No, I’m not ragging on blacks for this. We’ve got a white version of the phenomenon too: country singers. Most of them sound like normal human beings in conversation, but put a microphone in front of them, and they suddenly start twanging and whining like a broken screendoor.) And what little I could hear… just wasn’t funny.

Thus it is, I suppose, a credit to the screenplay that, although none of the comics the audience enjoys are funny, Holla’s routine is distinctly less funny. His material consists mostly of bouncing around the stage like he’s warming up for a gymnastics floor routine and yelling, “Lemme hear you say, ‘Holla!’” interspersed with the occasional “How y’all doin’?” (At one point in the movie, the Phantom Stranger tells Holla, “I’ve seen dead clowns funnier than you.” I think actually that “dead clowns” is a good description of the overall level of comedy overall, with Holla approaching the “dead accountant” level.)

And after Holla bombs and leaves the stage, we get our prime attraction: Michael Africa! No, he’s no funnier than any of the preceding comics, but he’s unfunny with an African accent, which seems to be gimmick enough for this crowd. This seems as good a place as any to make the requisite reference to “Informed Attributes,” as the movie seems dedicated to propagating them first and foremost.

But is he an accountant?

But after Michael Africa leaves the stage — the Phantom Stranger find him and plunges a knife into his neck!

By the next day, news of the murder is all over town (meanwhile, only the janitor’s mother is wondering where her baby boy is), and Mr. Fitz is determined to make a publicity killing off of it. So that night, every comedian includes riffs on the murder in his material. And man, this ain’t getting any better. Have I laughed yet? Cracked a smile? Felt one corner of mouth twitch ever so slightly? Nope. Nothing. I’m beginning to think that Hell is a nightclub with nonstop bad comics. At least, in this case, I only feel like I’m watching hell, not actually in it.

Well, some more people get killed, including a girl who heckled Holla his second night out, and then it all comes down to the third night, in which the Phantom Stranger starts knocking them off left and right. I suppose that there’s supposed to be a “whodunit-for-morons” puzzle here, but just in case you (or, um, your roommate) is a moron, I won’t spoil for you the awesome revelation of who the Phantom Stranger actually is. I can tell you, though, that it’s pretty damned apparent from the get-go, and there’s absolutely no suspense when you reveal the killer’s identity only once you have exactly two characters left alive.

“Hey! Look! They sell hats for white guys!”

They say that bad comedy is the most pathetic kind of failure, and I have to agree. And bad comedy cross-bred with a bad horror-mystery, if not more pathetic, is at least as pathetic on a broader scale.

On the other hand, calling this a “bottom of the barrel” production isn’t as insulting in reference to the Polonia brothers as it might be to other filmmakers, as these chaps can usually manage to dig right through the bottom of the barrel deep enough to mine coal. If that’s praise, they’re welcome to it.