He has made only one feature film – his debut Voracious Tiffany – and one and a half series for online television (Pěstírna and Autobazar Monte Karlo). Nevertheless, director Andy Fehu has already managed to gain the credit of a special author among beginning creators, which is worth watching. This also applies to the horror comedy Shoky & Morthy: The Last Big Action. It tells the story of two well-known and sovereign youtubers, who deprive the unsuccessful prank of sponsors and audiences and who try to get back on course by uncovering the mystery of a dead bride, which appears to drivers at the Nine Crosses motorway junction on the highway from Prague to Brno. In the film, which has been played by Czech cinemas since Thursday, Si Fehu continues to refine his instructively playful approach to dark genres, on which the Voracious Tiffany has already stood. The film could be included in the category of entertaining genre games working with youtuber techniques, but the author managed to do something extra.
Something for Netflix
Fehu (and his co-writer Ondřej Kopřiva) builds the story on the basis of films about the best friends (the so-called buddy movie), who solve their relationship and at the same time experience adventure. The central pair of Shoky and Morthy (Štěpán Kozub and Jakub Štáfek) – supplemented by the sellers of vacuum cleaners and the old youtuber Radomil (Tomáš Magnusek), the exact influenza sára Sára and the ghost hunter Lucia – send a search for the roots of the city legend associated with nine wooden crosses at the D1 motorway.
According to legend, a local ghost of a bloody bride appears, who was murdered together with the wedding guests by a disgraced ex-fiancé when she preferred another. Mortha happens to see her, too. When returning from a youtubering meeting in Brno, they witness an accident which, according to the shocked driver, was caused by the bloody bride. The couple is blocked on YouTube and quarreled over differing ideas about where their online careers should go, so they decide to say goodbye, a “real adult documentary that will buy Netflix.” Of course, the attempt at a Netflix-quality ghost will turn upside down. Not only because of Shoky, who is an unguided shot and would also let a friend bleed for viewing.
Shoky & Morthy is a film of two different halves: the first serves as a larger exhibition of elaborate action and structure in the second, stronger part. The film begins as a comedy, where the main attraction is Štěpán Kozub. In addition to his eccentric acting on the edge of the embarrassment, his own popularity, which stands on the online series of the Ostrava Theater Mír sKORO NAmizině and sketches in the improvisational formation Three Tigers, benefits here. More than one hundred and forty thousand people follow him on Instagram. Štáfka, known from the Vyšehrad series or the MMA ring, thirty thousand more people.
The film thus plays with their own popularity and the alter egoes present on the networks – and a well-thought-out and marketing-advantageous media crossover is as important a part as genre hybridization. Not only because the online world and the hunt for cranks, viewership and visibility are also one of the topics from which it tightens nonviolently. The rank of similar strategies includes the ironically / loving cast of director Tomáš Magnusek, the flag bearer of Czech film waste, who at some point steals a film for himself with an unexpected performance. Or generational references to the songwriting brothers Nedvěd, who are also a symbol of anti-cool and generational abyss.
But the film goes beyond blinking to those who know so-called. It shows the fundamental difference in the approach to one’s own “creation”. Unlike self-centered movie youtubers, they did at least what they do / did with love. It is no coincidence that it is the “embarrassing” Radomil who, in the end, emerges from the film as an authentic and sympathetic character.
What is real
The first part is tuned to YouTube video consumers. Scenes that cast the dynamics of relationships between characters and their characters often basically function as separate, funny mini videos. A form that does not have to fit everyone shows one essential thing. The authors are clear about the audience to which the film is directed. It is intended mainly for young audiences, which domestic creators, who strive for historical dramas and lifestyle comedies mainly for viewers in middle age, rather overlook. At the same time, it has enough attractive and sharing elements to captivate even the older viewer as another type of “summer” comedy.
The film gets another turn when the band embarks on a journey and the weight is transferred to Morthy (Štáfek has a strong acting charisma). Fehu finds himself in a territory he has traversed and where he is well – in horror. In Insatiable Tiffany about the search for a monster from Horní Jiřetín, the genre in exaggeration overturns and mixes with provinciality and local mundaneness. Shoky & Morthy does not lack exaggeration in dealing with genre rules. At the same time, it offers a journey through the turning points of the genre over the last forty years or so, through them, a apt commentary on the reality created on the networks.
Movies are a kind of small history of horror. Links to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Devil’s Exorcist, Creature, Snuff, Blair Witch Mystery, or Saw will appear. Always adapted to domestic conditions; thus somehow smaller, more provincial. And the discrepancy between the pattern and the reworked Czech version is an essential source of humor. For example, Magnusk’s Radomil, who is in convulsions, is not obsessed with the devil, but with alcohol – and instead of geysing vomiting, he just blinks.
However, Shoky & Morthy is not just a cleverly arranged catalog of references to groundbreaking works in the genre. Andy Fehu has stated in the past, in connection with the Growing Room series about illegal marijuana growing, that he “has no ambition to convey any messages.” Here, too, it does not demonstratively do so, nor does it hurt the practices of youtubers, but it still says something more ambitious. In the online world, everything is allowed, everything is possible, reality is presented as a lie and a lie as reality. It is not clear what is real, what is not – and what the consequences may be that we do not know it.
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