The Diarrhea Brothers Save the Day

Movie number 7 in Joel Haver's quest to make 12 feature films in 12 month. As with most of these, it's more impressive as a feat of sheer perseverance than it is as an actual movie - though he still has to somehow churn out 5 more films in just over a month if he's going to complete the challenge.

Joel has talked about this one as the only straight-up comedy of the bunch, and it does actually have some solid comedic set pieces and gags. However most of them feel like they could have been worked into any comedy film in some way, and surprisingly little comedy is got from the premise itself. Maybe that's because really this is an idea for a sketch, somehow dragged out to feature length. Even before watching this, looking at the runtime of 104 minutes was kind of daunting for something that sounds like it should have been a tight 80 at most. And that speaks to the film's biggest issue really, that it just needed to be tightened up an awful lot.

Joel has spoken a lot on his second YT channel about his ethos around movie making; he has some very strong opinions which are interesting though I don't fully agree with. It would be too much to go into here, but the main issue for me is that the production values of his films mean that they remain basically high-grade YouTube videos. It is sort of impressive that he's made 12 feature-length ones (though it's arguable if The Text is feature length) in a year, but I don't think any of them are polished enough to be considered suitable for, say, widespread commercial release, so I'm not sure ultimately what this exercise proves. You would think his efforts would be better spent focussing down on one movie, spending time on it and making it really good, but he seems really keen on his methods of high-speed, improvised film-making that gets very, very mixed results.

The Diarrhea Brothers Save the Day An absurd, nonsensical film filled with the dumbest choices-executed with such utter conviction that... can it really be dumb? No.

It's practically a blockbuster. Or at least, colossal by Haver's budget standards.

Also, it contains one of the funniest scenes I've ever seen. My sense of humor is simple, but the classic trope of "repeating what you hear in your earpiece without the other person knowing you have an earpiece while your friends are in a van talking over each other... and then a barrel of diarrhea gets spilled" - no, come on, that's just comedy gold.

And the surprise ending? It's not just dumb-it's completely unhinged, contradictory, unjustifiable.

So much so that it loops back around and works.

Like someone making a joke that doesn't land, then overexplaining it, making it even worse, but if they keep explaining long enough, with enough confidence, it somehow becomes funny again.

That's this ending.

And somehow, it clicks.

This is a good illustration of how hard it is to make a good comedy. A lot of effort has been put into this film, and it shows, but at the end of the day it doesn't manage to garner many laughs, and the characters fall kind of flat. The premise is absurd, which in itself is somewhat promising, but it never really goes anywhere. I think part of it is that the company is placed into the real world, and everyones natural reaction is "Why would I want diarrhea?" Which, sure is a natural reaction, but for a feature length film it wears a bit thin. Scenes tend to go on for a while without adding too much to it, but instead kind of just repeating and reframing the joke.

Again I think this illustrates why it's so hard to make a compelling comedy feature. The frequency and variation of jokes needs to be high, and especially the timing has to consistently land. That in itself might not have been a huge problem, but outside of a great performance by Sethward as the boss, the characters all fall kind of flat, and the plot feels like it just kind of happens vs something really driving it forward. There's also not really an emotional core to the story that feels genuine. Not that the film necessarily needed that but when the comedy doesn't quite work out, you have to fall back on the fundamentals of film, and unfortunately this doesn't have too much of that either.

Still though, a fascinating watch considering the experiment Joel Haver is currently conducting trying to make 12 features in a year.