In the often strange universe of low-budget cinema, there are many films which seem hand-tailored to the tastes of a specific rank-and-file. Take, for instance, SLICK SILVER...an obscure regional comedy of 1975. This featherlight farce/buddy flick/road movie has all the requisite trappings to appease the nethermost viewership of agreeable, domesticated Americans...it typifies a very distinct brand of "low comedy" found primarily in older TV sitcoms(it even culminates in a pie-fight, I kid you not). Ergo, If a middle-age waitress saying "kiss my grits" makes you wet yourself in hysterics, then, dammit, you will love SLICK SILVER . It's an unchallenging, occasionally cute pinch of harmless horseplay which illustrates a wily, funloving con-man's vagabond bromance with a mild-mannered, guitar-toting hitch-hiker. Penniless and hungry, these slippery flimflammers soon become the road-trucking dynamic duo of comical con-artistry...they plunder a laundromat for "new" digs, swindle a farm wife out of some chickens, impersonate a town preacher in a church tithings heist, and even streak bare nekkid down Main Street for a few bills.
Criminal protagonist characters are generally best written with certain chivalrous or poignant qualities appealing to the viewer's sentiments. Such winning pathos is sadly lacking in this peccant pair of marauding mountebanks, who casually prey upon the working class with nary a whit of magnanimous Robin Hood valor. Even a mutuality of warm, brotherly devotion, that chemistry so essential to the "buddy" film narrative, has gone roundly unobserved. As well, their farcical, though no-less ignoble petty-crime lowjinks rarely manage to transcend the aforementioned "kiss my grits" level of comedy...dialing 9-1-1 seems far more appropriate than ebulliently cheering them on.
At the tail-end of average for a 70s-era regional indie, it's passably played by a cast of relative unknowns, but suffers from a weak script subsuming what could be politely described as a plebeian brand of benign humor which courts the softer mind. In any case, its present availability seems quite limited, so chances are slim that it will bless your life any time soon.
4/10.
