ORIGINALLY POSTED ON STRAIGHT.COM, OCT. 4, 2006
By Steve Newton
When the Trailer Park Boys debuted on the Showcase channel in 2001, I couldn’t get enough of it. A mockumentary-style series about the day-to-day exploits of three pot-loving trailer-trash buddies and their assorted idiot friends and rivals, it was a raucous, taboo-blasting gas. The sight of Bubbles’ coke-bottle eyeglasses, Ricky’s grease-monkey sideburns, and Julian’s ever-present rum ’n’ coke became weekly TV highlights.
The characters’ brain-dead antics actually brought back fond memories of some of the guys I grew up with in Chilliwack.
Series creator, director, and head writer Mike Clattenburg takes all the funniest aspects of the cable show and splatters them across the big screen for Trailer Park Boys: The Movie. It’s freakin’ hilarious. I laughed out loud more than 10 times.
The plot is common to the series in that it kicks off with the criminally minded Ricky and Julian (Robb Wells and John Paul Tremblay) in trouble, getting shipped off to jail after a botched bank-machine theft. (They were apprehended by cops—played by rockers Gordon Downie and Alex Lifeson—with a car full of stolen smokes, but bug-eyed accomplice Bubbles [Mike Smith] got away.)
Eighteen months later, they’re given early release because a weaselly prison guard doesn’t want ace goaltender Ricky to lead his team in the ball-hockey final against the guards.
Typical of Ricky, as soon as he gets out he starts planning “the Big Dirty”, the heist that’ll realize his dream of early retirement, or as it’s referred to in the series, “Freedom 35”. But drunkard trailer-park supervisor Mr. Lahey (John Dunsworth) and his potbellied sidekick, Randy (Patrick Roach), are intent on running our heroes out of Sunnyvale Trailer Park. To exasperate him further, Ricky’s ex-girlfriend Lucy (Lucy Decoutere) has taken up with her boss, local hood and strip-club owner Sonny (Hugh Dillon of the Headstones), who’s intent on recouping the $4,000 investment he made in Lucy’s fabulous fake tits.
With all the Canuck rockers playing secondary roles and pulling cameos, it’s no wonder TPBTM is loaded with great tunes by Rush, the Tragically Hip, April Wine, and Helix (believe it or not, they had one too). The best scenes involve the trailer park’s lovable losers doing classically Canadian things (smoking weed, playing hockey, smoking weed, drinking beer, smoking weed, driving snowmobiles on bare roads) while the music of our nation plays along.
Like the Hip itself, The Movie may be too Canadian for those raised outside of the Great White North, but it’s a total hoot for homegrown hosers. If only they’d included more scenes with J-Roc (Jonathan Torrens), the white-bread rapper who thinks he’s black.
He cracks me up, know’d I’m sayin’?
Great review. I can tell you happily, you do not have to be from the Great White North to love this show. I am from a California and it is my favorite show.