"Rubber" Movie Review

Those who know me know I appreciate some pretty strange films. I am a huge fan of terror-bad movies like The Room or Birdemic: Shock and Terror, and I also really like more obscure movies that are brilliant in their weirdness. Rubber is one such film. 

The horror genre has given us some really interesting and strange killers over the years. For example, there's Jason Vorhees, a disfigured mama's boy who keeps coming back from the dead to kill teens. Freddy Kreuger; a vengeful spirit of a man burned alive who dispatches his victims in their dreams. Chuckie from the Child's Play franchise is a killer doll,  and there are plenty of other movies involving weird antagonists. There are killer leprechauns, sharks, snakes, clowns, tomatoes, and even birds to name a few. But Rubber introduces it's audience to a killer tire. Yep, you read that right. The film follows this tire on his journey of gaining sentience, and also gaining telekinetic powers. 

As the tire (credited as Robert) is transitioning from a discarded piece of junk to a psychic executioner, there is a group of spectators on a hillside watching the events unfold through binoculars in almost a Greek chorus fashion. There's also a sheriff who wants the movie to end, so he sets out trying to stop the tire from continuing his rampage. 

In essence, this is a pretty silly movie, but the premise is all pretty much based on having no reason. In fact, the sherriff has a whole speech in the beginning of the movie highlighting that sentiment. This movie is fairly basic in premise and production, but I feel that it doesn't really take anything away from the film. If anything, it just makes it more odd and endearing. The film was shot on a $500,000 budget and was directed by the French Dr. Oizo (aka Quentin Depieux) back in 2010. The film was originally shown at the Cannes Film Festival's Critic's Week and then was distributed on DVD from Magnet Releasing. 

The movie is really hard to explain- but it's more of a film you have to experience to be able to draw your own conclusions, as it's a film that will affect different people in different ways. As a fan of the ridiculous, I really enjoyed this absurd little movie. If you want to try something a little out of the norm or potentially artsy, this film is worth checking out.