Rock Slyde

"Andy Dick and Patrick Warburton appear on screen in top comedic form in the Independent feature, Rock Slyde, which premiered at the AFI Dallas Film Festival this past week.

The idea for the off-beat film was inspired by the handsome director's mother, Chris Dowling noted on the red carpet, with a sly smile on his face.

"Can't you make a movie that doesn't have any violence or gratuitous sex in it," she pointedly asked the talented screenwriter one day.

The Clark Kent look-a-like rose to the occasion by penning a script that hits the funny bone more often than not.

Patrick Warburton (private dick Rock Slyde) adeptly plays the role to the hilt - with a droll unaffected approach, mind you - that ultimately takes a poke at the film noir genre it sprang from.

Andy Dick - who sports a beard in this part - is hilarious in a zany role that is decidedly off- beat.

Part of the reason the cult figure the TV personality plays on screen succeeds so admirably is due to inpeccable timing on the part of Dick and his innate ability to create a character that resonates with its own truth within a specific context.

Unfortunately, Rock Slyde - the movie - lags at times.

Although Dowling is a competent writer with original ideas, the script should have been tightened a smidgen, to ensure lazy minds didn't wander a tad.

In fact, when I exchanged notes with a couple of other industry-types, they admitted they - too - started to snooze a little about three-quarters of the way through Slyde beneath the floodlights.

In its current incarnation, the full-length feature tends to lurch and burp a bit; then, roll over and die a second or two, before unexpecedly picking up again as it races to a hilarious finale.

In many respects the entertaining piece of fluff is uneven - but fixable - in my estimation.

For a low-budget feature (shot on an old soundstage at Sunset Blvd & Gower Street in the heart of Hollywood) that wrapped in a six short creatively-stuffed weeks, I found the production values to be surprisingly rich.

Warburton and Dick also manage to rise above the material and make it an inviting popcorn movie film buffs on the edge of the mainstream may be able to warm up to.

Teens may guffaw a lot, too, quite possibly transforming the little-movie-that-could into an unexpected hit come the lazy days of summer.

Of course, such a scenario is only within reach, if distribution is forthcoming, and a visionary studio backs Rock Slyde with eye-catching promos geared toward the market, of course!

1 thumb & 1 half-knuckle up!"

-Julian Ayrs, The Tattler

A down and out private detective (Patrick Warburton) engages in a turf war with a upstart quasi-religious cult, run by the Blessed Guru Bart (Andy Dick).

What I liked about this film was that Warburton had a role that was not terribly different in humor from "The Tick", possibly his best character ever. He has a wonderful voice and when used for comedy it really hits an audience in a way no other actor's voice can.

I also liked Eric Roberts being here. While he has fallen harder than almost any celebrity (his appearance in "The Dead Want Women" is lamentable) he does a great cameo here and I think it might almost be the last good comedy performance he has had (as of 2013).

First off I will say that the story didn't really have much going for it. So at that point I thought it would be hard to keep myself interested. But there was one thing that no matter what happened in the movie, always had me smiling. It was Patrick Warburton. He is an actor that has a very distinct voice that you will always remember. Every time he talked in the movie, I was laughing. Some of the dialog he used was cheesy, but worked since he had such a funny voice. There were some other interesting characters, but they were not as good. Andy Dick was the so called bad guy. It is hard to like Andy Dick as certain characters. He seemed to fit as this one though. The girl that was working for Warburton was Elaine Hendrix. I didn't like her as the character she was. She was a bit annoying. So overall if it wasn't for Warburton and some of his interesting and funny lines, I am not sure if I would of liked the movie at all.

"A laugh-out-loud send-up of Hollywood...and the film noir detective genre, "Rock Slyde" starts with what many big Hollywood films lack — a really good and very funny script.

Patrick Warburton as Rock Slyde, a cognitively clueless detective whose nose for crime is better than his noggin, was sad eyed, pitch perfect and endearing. Resisting the advances of femme fatale Rena Sofer's delicious Sara Lee because of a childhood spent watching "Soul Train" (but that's another story), Slyde faces down adversary cult leader Andy Dick (Bart of Bartology) to save his holdout office space in the ever-expanding Bartology building and rescue his brainwashed secretary. And if you think that sentence is pointedly pithy, "Slyde" is even more crammed full with over-the-top winks, asides and jokes including a cameo by Jason Alexander as a Jewish U.S. postal carrier enamored of Slyde's turn as an actor in a gay porn musical (but that too is another story).

"Rock Slyde" performances, cinematography, original score and songs (if you don't leave the theater singing, "swashbuckle me, swashbuckle, down on your knees," you're probably dead), and script are brilliant and of a piece — a carefully crafted piece that is a testament to creativity on the cheap — brilliance without big budgets. "

• Idyllwild Town Crier

I was fortunate enough to see this film at the 2009 AFI Dallas Int'l Film Festival as press for a new show to launch exclusively on demand in the Dallas market for Time Warner Cable called "Indie Scene".

I laughed my head off and so did the rest of the audience at both sold out screenings of this film, where people were turned away due to seating shortages. With all the laughing; some follow up lines were missed so the movie was even funnier at the second screening. This is a lighthearted poke fun at film movie that I really appreciated because of the absents of sex, drugs and violence. Will this film win an Oscar, no, they don't recognize comedies anyway but you will be quoting lines from the film with your friends. So with that being said if your looking to have a good time watching an Indie film, check out "Rock Slyde".