by MATTHEW WOODLEY

Name the character:

“I just ordered the new fuckin’ stuff from Swiss Chalet, and what they don’t realize is that I would pay $200 for that stuff. It’s just the best fuckin’ chicken in the world, man.”

Wrong. It’s director Mike Clattenburg, on the phone from his home in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, at the end of a long day of interviews. Though for people acquainted with the Trailer Park Boys, Ricky would have been a good guess—he might pay $200 for barbecue chicken. Julian would likely devise a scheme to steal the barbecue chicken, Bubbles spends all his money on cat food, Randy prefers cheeseburgers, and Mr. Lahey is too busy ramming booze down his throat and keeping a shitwatch over the shitgoons who run amuck in Sunnyvale Trailer Park.

For those less familiar with the boys, their new movie may well serve as an introduction. That’s something this Halifax-raised shitjournalist and long-time fan kept thinking about during its 90-something minutes.

A couple of years ago, the people behind the show inked a deal with Hollywood director (Ghostbusters, Meatballs, Kindergarten Cop) and producer (Animal House, Heavy Metal, Old School, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) Ivan Reitman. The series already had a cult following in the U.S., but has yet to garner the mass appeal that it has long held in Canada. Assumingly, the big screen is the place for a breakthrough, leaving Clattenburg and crew with the challenge of finding the balance between satisfying both the diehards and the movie-going millions south of the border (where, by the way, a distributor has yet to be found).

“It was difficult because Ivan Reitman wanted us to tell the story to a first-time audience,” says Clattenburg. “And how do we do that? We really wanted to jump off from season five—we had all these ridiculous ideas, most of which we did in [the not-yet-aired] season seven anyway. But you know, we’ve developed some things that worked in Canada. You kinda want to do them, but you don’t want to bore Canadian fans with the same thing. So we tried to put a fresh twist on it.”

The movie follows a formula similar to the show, and the fellas are in fine form. Ricky (Rob Wells) and Julian (John-Paul Tremblay) get out of jail, return to park life broke and immediately start looking for a way to get rich. This time it involves stealing a giant globe full of toonies and loonies donated to a charity glass globe in a movie theatre corridor.

Meanwhile, their slurring nemesis, Jim Lahey (fantastically played by John Dunsworth), looks for a way to get the boys back into jail. Ricky is distracted by his girlfriend Lucy’s (Lucy DeCoutere) new boyfriend (Hugh Dillon), who runs the strip club where she and her new boob implants work. Females figure more prominently in the movie than the series, from Ricky’s 10-year old daughter who’s trying to quit smoking, to Julian’s love interest, Wanda (Nichole Hiltz), a blonde American import (both in the movie and in real life). And for the first time, the production, no stranger to adult-only, takes the topless route.

Guns ’n’ ammo

“Ivan Reitman is the king of R-rated comedy,” Clattenburg explains. “He said, ‘You’ve gotta do some nudity.’ One of my favourite scenes with nudity is in Old School, when Will Ferrell’s running down the street completely naked and he’s drunk and he wants to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. And that really worked in an absurdist way. I wasn’t sure about doing it unless it really worked.”

While tits are time-tested on American screens, guns play a different role—at least in comedy. “He wasn’t a big fan of the gun stuff,” says Clattenburg.” We’ve done some really absurdist gun shit on the show and I don’t think that would fly in the movie, especially to an American audience. There’s so much gun violence in America.”

It’s easy to see where concessions were made, and for all the film’s funny, of which there’s ample amount, that’s the one place where Trailer Park Boys suffers. The best part of the series is its playing on the absurd—the stuff where the Boys pave their driveway in hash to hide it from the cops, where Ricky’s trucker dad pees in bottles and scatters them around the park, where Mr. Lahey drunkenly bow-and-arrows a blue jay to feed his assistant/gay lover Randy as a “cheeseburger” because he’s too broke to buy the real thing. But even that gay subplot is downplayed in the movie—just hinted at in fact.

“We actually shot a lot more of that—stuff where we saw Mr. Lahey and Randy waking up in bed next to each other, just like a normal routine,” says Clattenburg, laughing. “And there’s a lot of Lahey that didn’t make the movie too—frankly, some of his best stuff. We actually shot a lot more of J-Roc and we shot a lot more of Ricky, we shot a lot more of Julian and Bubbles. It was a question of what’s the best material in the context we’re doing, and that what we chose.”

TRAILER PARK BOYS: THE MOVIE OPENS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6

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