KEVIN SMITH GOES ONLY SKIN DEPP FOR HIS YOGA HOSERS

Smith and Depp's daughter hit the big time, kinda YEAR: 2015

Because he had no other choice, Kevin Smith started exactly where he was at... the very bottom, financially... for his black and white crass comedy, CLERKS, which had a great script, a gang of real characters playing fictional ones and a location that really put you there for the action and, on purpose, complete lack of...

Which was followed by the much too colorful (and hopelessly vacant) MALLRATS that led to Smith's best venture, CHASING AMY and, years later when his indie magic had dried up and after failing at the conventional box office, he intentionally returned to the slacker's den where, along with a podcast show, there's an attempt to make daughter Harley Quinn Smith a star. But not by herself. Along with this every-girl, just comfortable enough in front of the camera, is pixie model Lily-Rose Depp; the daughter of Johnny Depp, who, between million dollar PIRATE successes and a string of artistic misfires, seems to be doing Kevin a return-favor by appearing in both TUSK and the latest, YOGA HOSERS, as a spaced-out, boil-faced, scraggly-haired private eye (of sorts) named Guy Lapointe, a hybrid of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, Robert Shaw's Quint from JAWS and Peter Falk's scruffy TV Detective COLUMBO.

Cutesy Poster for Yoga Hosers

The main characters are the two teenage girls, both named Colleen, who, like Dante and Randall in CLERKS, work as... well... clerks at a convenience store; only more liken to a 711 instead of a rural-suburban dive-purgatory...

While Smith's two male CLERKS had polar opposite personalities, which is essential in any kind of buddy flick, these girls, staring at their cell phones and, as Canadians, pronouncing, for example, the word "About" as "A-Boot", are exactly the same...

Pop Culture guru Smith, like Quentin Tarantino, is heavily influenced by old stuff... ranging from The Fonz to JAWS... that he grew up on. If only there was more of a LAVERNE & SHIRLEY vibe here... a sit-com where two polar opposite girl roomies continuously kept each other going. Shirley is girl-next-door cute, extremely uptight and on the verge of having a mental breakdown, perpetually guided by the stronger, more experienced party girl, Laverne, who keeps herself out of trouble by keeping her best friend sane. In YOGA HOSERS, Colleen One and Colleen Two are basically clones and hardly even keep each other company. Perhaps the next feature could allow one of the duo to either surpass or digress so there's enough anti-chemistry to make the eventual kinship really mean something.

YogaHoserScore: *1/2

Like with TUSK, which centered on a loser who winds up captive at a madman's manor and then turned into a walrus, Kevin Smith goes so intentionally overboard, it's as if he's giving fans something so bizarre and intentionally-bad to be critic-proof: especially if said critics are uptight party poopers who just "Don't get it" to begin with. In HOSERS, the two teen parrots battle a bunch of tiny "Shatzis", all played by a computer-animated Kevin Smith, looking manufactured from a student film at a semi-expensive college. The shin high monsters, a cross between the creature Drew Barrymore battled in The General, the third tale in the Stephen King anthology CAT'S EYE, and what probably inspired that episode — Karen Black's famous Zuni Doll from TRILOGY OF TERROR. Herein, the victims all deserve to die, which happens so quickly that, while the girls sit around agreeing on everything that annoys them, it's all just too easy: a maze without corners.

Smith new style seems influenced by the chaotic mayhem of SHAUN OF THE DEAD director Edgar Wright, and there are moments to get jovially lost in. But it's Johnny Depp's pointless character who not only ruins a film already heavily marred with banality, but his cadence of speech is paint-drying-torture. Instead of providing necessary exposition, or being a strategic cameo, he rambles on and on: right when things almost begin to roll without him. And not only does he get in the way of whatever story Smith is trying to tell (like in TUSK), he makes it even harder for the audience to get to know the two girls we're supposed to love at this point. But if you want to hear the world's greatest Adam West imitation, standup-comic-relief Ralph Garman steals a "Lecturing Villain" scene that's all his own.