With Hess encouraging his performers to dial up the hick schtick to 11 and Hosking doubling down on the absurdist comedy routines, deliberately cheesy gore and unpleasant nudity at the expense of coherent characterizations, their films exude a condescension toward their characters that makes the experience of being an audience member unendurable in such soullessness.Ĭondescension is as far from Potrykus’s black-comic sensibility as one could imagine. Both of those films offer object lessons in what happens when self-satisfied filmmakers prize ostensibly beguiling quirks and cheap shock tactics above anything resembling recognizable humanity.

The appearance of The Alchemist Cookbook on the cinema landscape certainly couldn’t be better timed, especially as a corrective to Jared Hess’s recent heist yarn Masterminds and Jim Hosking’s concurrently released horror comedy The Greasy Strangler. This moment is not only one of the most hilarious scenes I’ve seen in a movie in quite a while, but it’s also a pretty good encapsulation of writer/director Joel Potrykus’s methods, with Cortez’s commitment to a blatantly ridiculous dare a miniature version of Potrykus’s own ruthless commitment to chronicling the strangest of human behavior. Cortez takes him up on the challenge, and even though he clearly can’t stand the taste on his first bite, he tries his best to hide this from his friend and takes an even bigger batch for his second helping, only for him to finally give up soon after.

About a third of the way into The Alchemist Cookbook, Sean (Ty Hickson) dares his friend Cortez (Amari Cheatom) to eat a can of cat food.

The alchemist cookbook 2016