VERY BAD THINGS

• Starring Christian Slater, Jon Favreau and Cameron Diaz
• Directed by Peter Berg
• Rated R, with strong violence, profanity and sick humor; running time 101 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a 6

By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle

(Nov. 25, 1998) -- Black comedy exploded with often tasteless delight on the screen in 1998, starting with There's Something About Mary and continuing with Happiness. Now filmgoers will face the last of the year's trilogy of bad taste -- Very Bad Things.

Christian Slater, Jon (Swingers) Favreau and Cameron Diaz co-star in this darkly violent comedy about a bachelor party that goes very bad -- and then triggers a downward spiral of paranoia, betrayal and even more violence.

Favreau and Diaz play Kyle and Laura, a Los Angeles couple in the midst of last-minute wedding preparations. But first, Kyle is being escorted by his buddy Robert (Slater) and three other friends (Daniel Stern, Jeremy Piven and Leland Orser) to a flamboyant Las Vegas bachelor party.

However, the night of drinking, debauchery and drugs comes to a crashing halt when a hired hooker dies in a bout of rough sex. Matters go from bad to worse when a hotel security guard arrives to answer a noise complaint. But once he discovers the horror in the room, he's also dispatched.

The highly organized Robert takes charge, ordering his shocked buddies to dismember the two bodies and help him bury the remains in the nearby desert. So ends the film's bloody opening half.

The boys return to L.A., where Laura continues to finish her wedding plans. Guilt and paranoia, though, have Kyle and his friends firmly out of whack. Only Robert is keeping a cool head -- but also showing clearly psychotic tendencies. Robert is determined to keep the Las Vegas deaths under wraps, even if more people must die.

But he may have met his match in the determined Laura. This is her wedding, damn it! Nothing is going to ruin her day!

Very Bad Things marks the directorial debut of actor Peter Berg (of TV's Chicago Hope). He stages several legitimately funny moments of ghoulish humor and builds the comic and dramatic tension to a hilariously out-of-control finale. But he sometimes deflates the humor with long, dragged-out debates by the characters about the "very bad thing" they've done.

Berg also gets first-class performances out of only three members of his ensemble -- Slater is a spooky, determined ringleader, Favreau is amusingly shell-shocked as the groom in a wedding gone to hell; and Diaz is fabulous as a bride whose walk down the aisle will stop for nothing, even if she has to step over bodies.

The three other members of the ensemble are less successful -- Stern contributes a frantic, one-note performance, while the bland Piven and Orser hardly register.

While There's Something About Mary specializes in gross-out, sexually oriented humor and Happiness spotlights creepy perversion, Very Bad Things generates its laughs out of Grand Guignol violence and the resulting paranoia, and to my taste, is generally a little less offensive.

Still, 1998 hasn't been a pleasant year for squeamish filmgoers. Very Bad Things won't change that much.