A couple weeks ago, I went to the 35th anniversary of Peewee’s Big Adventure featuring a talkback with Paul Reubens. During that discussion he did a lot of things, like release air from a big red balloon for fifteen minutes very, very slowly, and shuffle a large number of cue cards together ominously, but one of the things I remember him talking about was that one of the major cinematic influences for the movie is a scene from Disney’s 1960 film Polyanna. The story is about a young girl, much like Peewee, whose disposition is always positive despite all of the madness in the world around her, but at one point toward the climax of the movie, she falls out of a tree and wakes up in a hospital bed, also like Peewee, and curses everyone in the town who’s waiting at her bedside, suddenly chastened by her bad fortune.
For whatever reason, while I was sitting in the theater for my second to last show of the spring series of Cinequest (RIP), I started thinking about Polyanna’s unraveling and the way that the protagonist Jim has a similar kind of experience.
Survival Skills‘ premise is that it’s a parody of a police department training video from the 1980s, which should be reason enough to go out and see it. It is everything it purports to be and more. The film has a lot of fun in its first act with the juxtaposition of absurdist imagery to set the tone: an image of a young boy with a BB gun stacked onto a man with a bloody nose with VO of the narrator talking about Middletown, USA’s love of Ronald Regan, making no mention of the violence happening on screen. The narrator’s penchant for props reflects more of this humor: the spinning game wheel labeled with tasks for police rookies including “precious metal theft, drugs, and domestic violence”–a potent little tricolon descens. The static of the tape cassette excellently conveys and foreshadows tension within and between scenes, much like the sensational 2009 gonzo YouTube documentary Marble Hornets, which if you haven’t seen, you should stop, right now, and watch.
Survival Skills is structurally very tight, split into “lesson” chapters that serve to contain jokes and set up new ones. In Lesson Four: Your Doubt, the movie takes a sharp turn and our main guy turns into a bit of an anti-hero. The elements of training video drop away for a passable thriller of a movie, but the jokes start to fall apart. By lesson five, we are fully off the rails with “Satanic Ritual,” but it’s a controlled tumble toward the cement guardrails. The business with Matthew 21:21 is actually quite fun, ignites some thought about faith and having one’s fate tested, but also the fine line between faith, kindness, and insanity. I love the double ending.
This film is thoroughly enjoyable and worth multiple rewatches. I really hope it comes back in August so that I can see it again.
