Altamont at Crystal Lake
Director David Arquette’s cool kid-opusThe Tripper chops up Regan youth with a debatable legacy

By Hunter Stephenson

The Tripper is the directorial debut of actor David Arquette, who is the husband of Friends actress and co-producer Courtney Cox Arquette, and the brother of Patricia Arquette, whose husband, former-Punisher Tom Jane, co-stars. Rounding out The Tripper’s sizeable cast of cashed-in favors are Lukas Haas, Balthazar Getty, Jaime King, Paul Reubens, Paz de la Huerta and Jason Mewes. So, without seeing the movie, you can already identify The Tripper ‘s trivial place in cinematic history: it is the lone slasher movie starring “elusive” semi-celebs found in the pages of New York-based hip-lit glossies like Black Book.

Arquette created and co-wrote a quirky enough horror premise to match his Scream rep, taking the basic structure and setting of a traditional Friday the 13th entry and dousing it with drug use and a right-wing villain—his Jason Vorhees is a maniacal, axe-wielding neo-con that wears a Ronald Regan mask and a suit. The singular vision of Arquette lends the movie its greatest strength besides the aforementioned cast, which plays along without fuss but never truly partakes in any on-camera altered-states—the kind of stuff that would earn The Tripper cult status instead of phoning in its bid through “one of them fancy lads,” to randomly quote David Letterman in Cabin Boy.

The fact that The Tripper lost its distribution deal this year might have something to do with the movie possessing the low-budget quality of a cheapie shown on Comcast’s pitiful FEAR.net (instead of a release date dispute as purported). Its beginning is particularly rough, with credible actors falling implausibly into the next scene like a porn scene proceeded it. And mid-way into the movie shots are so poorly executed they go grainy and muddy and all you can think about are film students with guns in their frustrated mouths (put ‘em to use for your careers, people).

Knowing that Arquette is the director, however, makes the majority of The Tripper's pacing fuck-ups borderline excusable. The guy obviously didn’t make a mint on this, and the movie’s off-kilter, amatuerish sensibility is original and unpredictable—with main characters bugging out after getting shot in the mouth with water-guns filled with LSD, having their hands comically chopped off by the killer, and having conversations while screwing doggie-style in a Scooby-Doo van (was Bijou out of the country?). The killer, who goes by the name of “Ronnie” and is played by Vincent Gallo*, can be interpreted as a lightjab at the gimmicky, banal villains that grace Blockbuster's shelves with holographic straight-to-DVD covers and titles like Jack Frost and Uncle Sam.

But there are also quibbling comparisons on the Web between Ronnie’s symbolism here and the similarly president-masked robbers in Kathryn Bigelow’s classic surfer-Busey actioner Point Break. Yeah, there really are. Where The Tripper has no comparison is its utilization of the horror genre to skewer the dollar-fueled motivations behind today’s music festivals and their clueless parent-funded hippie patrons. When Paul Reubens’ tight-fisted festival organizer must hide in a realistically putrid Porta Potty (yeah, in it) to avoid Ronnie, the scene is golden in its quiet staging of familiar repulsion gone Karma. As are scenes with Ronnie rampaging through the malnourished bodies of a music fest’s late night drum circle revelers, or Lukas Haas falling victim after playing a painfully inept acoustic number to get him laid. (Fishbone, who inexplicably cameo, are left with their ska-loving limbs intact.)

Anyone who’s dropped a few too many psychedelics and observed the tweeking, un-policed vagrancy on display at Bonnaroo or especially at Woodstock ’99 would not be too shocked if a freak string of homicides were suddenly announced from the stage—Altamont meets Silent Night, Deadly Night. That such a generation-defining string of murders hasn’t happened yetis what gives a self-fulfilling director-and-friends’ entertainment like The Tripper its embers of watchability. You can do your best to offset the buzz, but David Arquette’s shaky debut will come to be a minor cult flick on DVD, simply because you and your friends weren’t cool or connected enough to go out into the woods and make a novel, cheapo-horror flick first.

*actually played by Chris Nelson, the groom in Kill Bill

This discourse of The Tripper is written by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.