Yet he seems sullen and withdrawn by comparison when his friend Cortez (a hilarious Amari Cheatom) arrives, bearing needed supplies but also bringing more outside scrutiny than Sean wants at present.
In Hickson’s irresistible performance, Sean is an extrovert in an introvert’s hermit-like circumstances, one who sometimes jumps up and down on a fallen tree trunk for the sheer fun of it. Of course, it might also summon up an ancient demon whose subterranean bellows can occasionally be heard echoing through the forest, and who doubtless will be more trouble than Sean is equipped to handle.įor the time being, however, he’s giddy about his prospects, despite having only a slate-gray cat named Kaspar as an audience. It involves a chemistry set, a blowtorch, a gas mask, wild-animal traps, Latin incantations and other tools by which he apparently hopes to supernaturally generate wealth. Though we have zero idea how exactly he wound up here, Sean (Ty Hickson, “Gimme the Loot”) seems to know just what he’s doing in the backwoods of West Michigan’s Allegan County. It’s certain to expand the writer-director’s audience from his more reality-tethered black comedy “Buzzard,” which also premiered in SXSW’s Visions program two years earlier.
#Joel potrykus movie#
Hardly a conventional horror movie - though it would match up very nicely on a double bill with “The Witch,” or “The Blair Witch Project” for that matter - and far from scary (save for its protagonist), this unclassifiable miniature involving a man in a trailer in the woods trying to contact the Dark Lord is as funny and distinctive as it is near-plotless. Welcome to Heck, Texas.If you only see two American indie features co-starring Satan this year, one should obviously be “The Witch.” The other almost certainly will turn out to be “The Alchemist Cookbook,” the latest micro-budget effort from Grand Rapids, Mich., auteur Joel Potrykus. Your favorite brand of disease is back in stock. Somewhere deep in East Texas, the hunt is on, fueled by self-hate, cough syrup, white whales, massive zits, freakshows, madness, dead pets, lost children, killer coffee, rats, Satan, good times, bad people, vomit, dementia, diarrhea, sex, and clowns. What’s it like to suffer from reality sickness? Read this book and find out.”-Stephen-Paul Martin, Author of Changing the Subject and The Ace of Lightning Somewhere between Eraserhead and Slacker, Heck, Texas pursues the white whale of post-apocalyptic mediocrity, and Tex Gresham has just the right kind of deadpan dark humor to make the story he’s not quite telling work brilliantly. Nothing at all like Winesburg, Ohio, this collage text reveals things you probably already knew but wish you didn’t. fragments-some grimly realistic, some grimly absurd, some grimly satirical, some downright disgusting-skillfully capture the essence of a trashy Texas town. “This book is trash.”-Joel Potrykus, Director of Buzzard, The Alchemist Cookbook, and Relaxer book will not have an easy life, but rather a long one, as the anger in it is part of the mood of our times.”-Werner Herzog, Director of Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man “This is a very unruly book, in the best sense of the word, and it only coincides with the breakdown of literary standards we are witnessing now.