[Fantasia 2020 Review] Fried Barry Is Overcooked

Sometimes a film warns you. 

Before Fried Barry even begins, we're treated to a Simon Bates-styled age restriction clip with the narrator warning about the horror, sex drugs and worse we’re going to experience in the upcoming 100 minutes.

He didn't go far enough. 

Fried Barry is an oddity of a film that can best be described as a drug-fueled exploration of the worst of humanity in South Africa. Let's not beat around the bush: Fried Barry is offensive from the very beginning. I'm going to go a little further and say that, intentional or not, the first act is deeply homophobic in a way that instantly set me on edge.

It’s a slight spoiler, but it’s important and, truthfully, one of the reasons I dislike this film. Barry (or the alien controlling Barry...more on that in a moment) directly or indirectly kills three people in this movie. The first is a gay man who offers him a blow job, one is a sex worker--whose name in the credits is merely “transgender sex worker”--who is chased by a “suck your dick”-spouting possessed Barry into a hit-and-run. The final one is a literal monster of a human being. Taken together, this film made me feel uncomfortable at the very least. Because regardless the filmmaker’s intent and whether he purposefully had Barry kill these two queer people or used them as set dressing to tell a very straight story about the effects of drugs or society’s evil...well, it’s not a good look. 

Backing up a bit now, Fried Barry is about a bastard of a man named, well, Barry (Gary Green). While married to a woman named Suz (Chanelle de Jager) and father to a son named Bubby (Cruz Dettmer), he treats both with utter disdain. After stumbling home from a night of shooting up heroine and who knows what else, Suz lets him have it in a profanity-laden tirade in both English and Afrikaans and he leaves in anger with a, “he doesn’t even look like me” jab about their son. Barry then stops at a bar and a patron tells him about the racism in early Walt Disney films (and he’d know because, in his words, he’s “a little racist, too”) before shooting up again. He wanders the streets of Cape Town in a heroine haze until he’s abducted by penis-injecting aliens and deposited back on the streets to go from bizarre situation to bizarre-er situation.

Written over the course of three days and with a “script” by director Ryan Kruger that was more a scene breakdown than an actual script, Fried Barry is a series of increasingly vile or hyper-real or simply outlandish vignettes. Some of these work incredibly well, such as when Barry gets dragged into a dance club and is offered a hit of ecstasy. After a hit, he grabs the whole bag and literally gnashes on them with his almost robotic jaw. Because, it’s implied, Barry has now become a vehicle for an alien being who doesn’t understand the world he finds himself in, watching this possessed Barry truly let loose on the dance floor is a sight to behold. His head bops to the music. The music amps in time with the drugs until he’s writhing on the dance floor, letting loose and going crazy has he comes one with the music.  

Gary Green himself is an epiphany of physical acting. His vacant gaze mixed with a body that feels parroted by a different being creates a performance that is always intriguing to watch. For instance, after leaving his soul on the dance floor, he gets picked up a woman (everyone seems to want to fuck this newly possessed Barry) and has mechanical sex with on the couch. As she gets bored and tells him to make some noise, he begins “HOO!”-ing inappropriately. It’s absurdly funny, of course. 

Movies that are just an assorted mix of vignettes strung together by frenetic filmmaking live or die on their individual scenes. Some, such as the dance club sequence or a surreal encounter with a serial kidnapper, work beautifully. Others, such as the early emphasis on killing queer people or an out-of-touch sequence set in a mental institution with frankly insulting mental illness caricatures, the whole thing feels like a mismatched mess. 

Director Ryan Kruger’s time directing music videos for South African metal bands showcases his eye for mirroring action and music. He has a strong visual sense of storytelling and his vision is helped along by cinematographer Gareth Place (hired a day before shooting) and, most importantly, electronic artist HAEZER. The way HAEZER mirrors the action with fantastic industrial and electronic beats creates some thrillingly paced sequences. Fried Barry has style for days and the neon and sweat-drenched visuals coupled with an intense, vinyl-worthy score makes the film interesting on a audio-visual level. It’s just that the lack of script incinerated most of the good intentions. It’s meant to be offensively humorous, but I found it a chore. I “got” it...I just didn’t care. It’s a movie about an alien that saved the day but killed some gays along the way. 

At least the score fucking rocked.