It’s quite common for movies – especially horror movies – to bolster their significance with a mid-trailer quote. You know, something like “This is the scariest film I have ever seen – Vanity Fair” or “This film made me vomit blood into a child’s lap – New York Times”.
Fred Durst’s new film, The Fanatic, is no exception. Sixteen seconds into its new trailer, a quote arrives reading: “You are a fan. Without you I’m nothing – Hunter Dunbar.”
Now, Hunter Dunbar isn’t a movie reviewer I’d heard of, so I Googled him. And it turns out that he isn’t a reviewer at all. There are a few Hunter Dunbars in the world – one apparently works in the artificial intelligence field, another is something called a “Salesforce architect” – but none were responsible for the quote. Because Hunter Dunbar is the name of a character from The Fanatic.
Let that sink in for a moment. Fred Durst made a horror film that goes out of its way to quote its own character in the trailer. But, oh, if that were the weirdest thing about The Fanatic.
From the look of it, The Fanatic is every Bad Fan movie trope rolled into one. There are elements of Misery. There are elements of The King of Comedy. There are elements of One Hour Photo. There are elements of Patton Oswalt’s decade-old dramatic curio Big Fan. A celebrity has a fan, the fan crosses a boundary, hijinks ensue. You have seen a million films like The Fanatic before. But at the same time it seems very, very unlikely that you have ever seen anything like The Fanatic. Because, to use a technical term, hoo boy.
The most obvious place to start is casting, because The Fanatic stars John Travolta as the troubled fan. But maybe “stars” is the wrong term. Maybe “is barely able to contain” might be better, or “gets eaten alive by”. This is an interesting period for John Travolta, one destined to go down as his prosthetic era. After his turn in The People vs OJ Simpson, in which he played Robert Shapiro in the style of an alternate-reality David Gest, he appears to have grown fond of overhauling his look as dramatically as possible whenever he can. His John Gotti, for instance, ended up looking like what would happen if you let a child draw Donald Trump on an egg.
But in The Fanatic, Travolta rolls the dice in a colossal way. His character, Moose, is a walking bundle of quirks and affectations that barely even register as human. He’s wearing the wig of a man half his size. He’s stooped and twitchy. He blinks like a man trying to gain secondary employment as a human staple gun. He stumbles around like a toddler with a poo-y nappy. It is acting you can see from space. The whole performance seems designed to be cut together for a celebratory Oscars highlight reel, without realising that it all takes place within a horror movie directed by Fred Durst.
The Travolta performance is what will draw the most attention to The Fanatic, but there are plenty of other grace notes if you look closely enough. Hunter Dunbar – the character, not the salesforce architect – is a Hollywood “action hero” who, if I’ve got this right, is the star of a fictional film called Space Vampires. And, judging by the trailer, Hunter is also a celebrated author. At a signing, he sits in front of a poster for his autobiography that contains the quote “A fascinating peek into the industry – Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times”, leaving you convinced that three different newspapers gave the book an identical review.
There’s the shot of Hunter’s award table, which contains what appear to be many novelty sex toys, each engraved with the words “Hunter Dunbar” in the same font. There is, unless I am very much mistaken, a shot of a Hunter Dunbar voodoo doll carved out of butter. There’s the ending, where Travolta staggers around with one of his eyes gouged out, possibly because he made the mistake of watching the rushes of his own film.
If you’d told me 20 years ago that John Travolta from The Thin Red Line would star in a film by Fred Durst from Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, I would have told you to get out of of town. If you told me that now, I’d still probably tell you to get out of town. But it happened, and The Fanatic exists, and wild horses couldn’t stop me from watching it.
The Fanatic is out in the US on 30 August with a UK date yet to be announced