Bucky and the Squirrels is just as nutty of a movie as it sounds. The comedy, directed by Allan Katz had fans laughing for better or for worse. All of these laughs made reviewers go nuts and gave it a 7.6 on IMDB.
The story is set in Appleton, WIsconsin and it’s about a 60’s band that supposedly died in a plane crash but recently was found preserved perfectly. They were then shipped to the Appleton Cryonics facility where they were thawed. Then they had to relearn everything they knew how to do since they were born. So they were what some would call man-babies. Once they learn everything they are sent out into the world. Though, being gone for over 50 years meant they didn’t pay any taxes, and they got a visit from the IRS which led to some trouble for the band.
The cinematography was at best ok in some parts of the movie. I say this because most of the time they didn’t use any lighting to enhance scenes. There is one exception to this though when there was a concert scene, the lights were set up like an actual rock concert. So overall the the lighting was average.
The dialogue was wacky but in a good way. The Squirrels said some things that made you laugh because they didn’t make sense. Then there were the times that the reporter would be interviewing someone from Appleton Cryonics and they would just argue with the reporter instead of answering the reporter’s questions.
The main song that plays in the movie is “Do the Squirrel” which is good. The song was used in the background of a memorabilia shop in the movie as well as in the concert scene and other times. I felt it was good for the director to deliberately choose to have the band only produce one song because it added to the band’s wackiness.
It is very important to understand that this film is set up like a fake documentary or mockumentary as some call it. So we follow the reporter first in a more tv news report style that transforms into interviews of the Appleton Cryonics staff to him just trying to uncover more on the story.
There are times where they build humor and plot into this well and sometimes they don’t. For example when the reporter is interviewing people, the interviewees reveal that up until the Bucky and the Squirrels were found frozen the company didn’t really do much…or even anything at all.
A time they incorporate humor well is when the reporter will do a scene and then pass it off to another reporter but they don’t cut until a minute later. For example he might say, “Back to you Nate.” or something like that and they wouldn’t cut until about a minute and we would see him picking his nose or doing something funny that we wouldn’t see if the camera wasn’t rolling.
There is one scene where there is supposedly a reporter showing the crashed plane and the frozen Bucky and the Squirrels. We do not get to see this due to the fact that there is just a video loop of snow falling. Now I don’t know if this was done to add humor or because of their small budget but I often found these scenes being dragged on and I started to get bored.
All in all, If you really want to see this movie then go because you will get a good kick out of it. Though I would recommend to the average viewer to just wait until it goes on Redbox.
