Last month I got interested in the indie writer/director Todd Rohal, and reviewed three of his movies: THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE, THE CATECHISM CATACLYSM, and of course his latest, FUCK MY SON!. Now I watched another one.

Of the Rohal joints I’ve seen so far, NATURE CALLS (2012) is the closest to a normal, mainstream comedy. It stars well known comedians/funny actors, it’s full of many broad, silly jokes, its third act shift into craziness overdrive is tame compared to Rohal’s other films. But not in a bad way. It’s a very funny movie with plenty of the director’s personality evident, which is kind of a relief because jesus christ man look at this DVD cover:

I don’t think Rohal is trying to be subversive with this one, but it kinda does the trick just by looking like disposable crap but having some bluntly accurate social satire and a strange tone that’s pretty much a family movie but with death and boobs and cursing.

Patton Oswalt (YOUNG ADULT, CHAIN REACTIONS, Ain’t It Cool News) stars as Randy Stevens, a stubbornly passionate scout leader trying to keep alive the troop he took over from his beloved dad (John Tobias, “Strip Club Man No. 2,” LOLA VERSUS), now non-verbal and bed-ridden in a facility. Randy struggles to keep modern, pampered kids invested in scouting, partly because their helicopter parents won’t let them go out into the actual woods. Randy has to set up in parking lots “next to a hobo toilet,” according to one kid. Now he might have to give up on even doing that because most of the kids want to skip the campout to go to a slumber party at the McMansion of his brother Kirk (Johnny Knoxville, LORDS OF DOGTOWN), who did not inherit the scouting bug.

The sleepover is like a birthday party, but it’s in honor of Kirk’s adopted African son Dwande (Thiecoura Cissoko)’s first year in the United States. I enjoyed this harsh caricature of American excess: Kirk and his macho chief of security Gentry (Rob Riggle, DEAD RISING: WATCHTOWER) drink beer from steins, yelling at a baseball game and several other TVs, as the kids drink chocolate milkshakes and giant cups of root beer. They all have leather recliners and the room is decorated with trophies and cut outs of basketballs, baseballs and footballs. When more kids arrive they’re all carrying their own TVs to add to the display.

Dwande doesn’t seem to be into this. He goes upstairs, and I laughed pretty hard at the reveal that his room has an ATM in it.

It’s not a non sequitur – Kirk’s money comes from an ATM machine empire. Still funny, though. Uncle Randy sneaks in and convinces Dwande and the other kids to slip away for a real camping trip out in nature, when they will try to earn their lifesaving badges. One of the selling points is a perfectly shitty computer animated ad about a boy scout decapitating a dragon that then turns into an electric guitar.

So part of this movie is about Randy and his fellow scout leaders Eddie (Eddie Rouse, GEORGE WASHINGTON, PANDORUM, DRAGON EYES) and Ivan (Ivan Dimitrov, the Guatemalan in THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE) trying to get a bunch of rowdy, not-outdoorsy kids interested in the outdoors. Also Randy sneaks his dad out to go on one last campout. He pushes him around in a wheelchair with two flags on the back. The old man keeps getting excited and honking a horn.

There are some left turns like a crazy death and a naked lady on a motorcycle (Jill de Jong, according to IMDb the official model for Lara Croft for the sixth game, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness) who serves sort of the same role as the wolf in THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Meanwhile, Kirk and Gentry consider this kidnapping, so they go on the hunt, joined by Caldwell (comedian Patrice O’Neal in his final movie), a dad who wants to kick Randy’s ass for telling his kids he was dead (long story). These guys continue to be representative of a certain type of toxic asshole, so Kirk wears a Bluetooth headset the whole time (that Lobot thing that was the sign of a grade-A asshole in the aughts) and Gentry throws around cop and military lingo.

“What’s the 20 on that scumbag?” he asks.

“I don’t know what a 20 is,” Caldwell admits.

In typical Rohalian fashion things get more random as it goes along, and the Stevens brothers both get pretty mangled. A weird joke that I enjoyed: Kirk demands the scouts build him a stretcher, and one of the kid says “the thing from the Bible?” Later the kid has built him a cross. Didn’t know what a stretcher was, it turns out. So Kirk just goes along with it and they carry him home on a cross.

My favorite part, though: an explosion has melted the Bluetooth into his inner ear, and it still sort of works, so whenever someone tries to call him it’s a horrendous torture.

One pretty typical comedy thing that I’m not too fond of is that despite Kirk being such an absolute dipshit, at the end we’re supposed to accept that he grows a little and turns out to be kind of a sweetheart. I mean it’s a nice thought, but I don’t quite buy it. Also difficult to believe: he has a very reasonable and nice wife, Janine (Maura Tierney, THE TEMP), whose youthful idealism in the Peace Corps led to their adoption of Dwande. She doesn’t seem like she would really put up with Kirk’s women-belong-in-the-kitchen-making-snacks-for-the-party assholery, but it mostly works because Tierney is so good and projects that she knows her life is ridiculous but doesn’t know how to get out of it. And there’s a funny running gag that one of the kids at the party (Regan Mizrahi, Dora the Explorer) stays behind to hit on her.

To make things even more farcical, the moms of all the kids eventually figure out that they’re missing and go after them in an all mini-van convoy. Pretty much all of the characters (including the naked motorcycle lady and a forest ranger I haven’t mentioned yet, played by Darrell Hammond) converge at the same spot in the woods at the same time. Sometimes I like that level of silliness.

Rohal regular Robert Longstreet shows up for one scene near the beginning, and Steve Little is credited, I think he’s a voice on the phone.

I definitely never heard of this movie when it came out, and wondered if anybody saw it. According to Box Office Mojo it made $646 worldwide. Pretty sure that’s not in millions, so I think it counts as DTV. It has a 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, 30 on Metacritic, nothing higher than 50 on there, lots of reviews talking about Rohal’s “inept filmmaking” and what not. (FUCK MY SON! has a 36% on RT and not enough reviews on Metacritic.)

Like all Rohal movies, then, it’s probly not for most people. It made me laugh though.