Krippendorf's Tribe (1998)
Directed by Todd Holland
Written by Charlie Peters

I am not big on regret, but of all the events in my life, the one I most regret is ever hearing the title Krippendorf's Tribe, still worse was that I was stupid and gullible enough to actually watch it, roped in because it was an in-flight movie and I was desperately bored. That one mistake haunts my days, for it has been years since that viewing, and still, sometimes at night I awaken in a furious sweat, and scream the word "Krippendorf!" Someday, at my funeral, they will say something like, "May the Gates of Heaven fly open to welcome him, despite that he watched Krippendorf's Tribe."

Let me put it another way. It would be a far greater thing to have my intestines slowly pulled through a small opening in my belly, then have them jumped upon by a mortally obese tax inspector who eats the stepped-upon intestines and vomits them out, then be forced to each the vomit, then be forced to smile and perform selected works from "Now That's What I Call Music 6," than to EVER watch one single, accursed nanosecond of Krippendorf's Tribe again.

KT is an indescribable nightmare. It is a slap in the face to movies that slap the audience in the face. It is exponentially worse than Harlem Nights, Moon Over Parador, Escape from LA, Drop Dead Fred, Striking Distance, Another Stakeout, and any other cinematic monstrosities you might come up with. KT is, quite possibly, the worst movie ever made, exclamation point.

According to all laws of science, nature, humanity and art, KT is theoretically impossible. And yet, somehow, it exists. Men who long ago gave up hope of ever finding Bigfoot and Nessie are among the few people who can take heart from KT, along with physicists, hardcore masochists, devil-worshippers, and experts in impossible interstellar propulsion systems. But the rest of us are in serious trouble.

KT kills the possibility for laughter, for joy, for children riding bikes on a summer afternoon. It blots out the sun and turns Jupiter into a massive black hole. It ages pretty girls into old women eating haggis with their bare hands; transforms the cool, dewy morn into a blazing oil fire in Kuwait; and makes hardened soldiers shit themselves. Twice.

KT is so awful, it's like wetting your bed constantly, every night, from the age of 12 to 62, and knowing that everyone you've ever met knows it because you always stink of urine. It's like coming home from work to find your wife in bed, screwing the dog, and when she realizes you're there she rolls her eyes and says (to the dog), "Oh look, the loser's home again," and then they both laugh at you. I assure you, dear reader, neither of these terrible scenarios happened to me, but having seen KT, I feel as if they really did.

Watching KT is not just like having a terminal disease for an hour and a half, you actually have a terminal disease while you are watching it! If you stand within ten feet of a copy of KT in any format, you will be inexplicably stricken with sadness and despair for months afterward. Ask my wife. A mere mention of the word "tribe," even with no possible connection to KT, sends me into a fit of uncontrollable weeping, accompanied by several days huddled in the closet in the fetal position, moaning and drooling, my eyes rolled back into my head. There is no other possible explanation for my behavior. I have Krippendorf's Syndrome.

Perhaps the only cure is to write this review (for isn't that also the cure for cancer? to write a review of it?). The "plot" of KT has an incompetent anthropologist (played by Richard Dreyfuss) lose all of his research for an important lecture on a "discovery" that turns out to be a fake. To continue the ruse and enjoy the personal use of a huge research grant, Dreyfuss enlists his family and a fawning, idiotic junior anthropologist (Jenna Elfman) to recreate a mythical lost tribe in their backyard. They film themselves in supposed tribal garb chasing chickens and doing other stupid, supposedly "tribal" things, including an achingly annoying "circumcision." The only scene in movie history as fake, phony, staged, and unfunny as this is when Dan Aykroyd told Chevy Chase to "suck the poison" out of his ass in Caddyshack II. And even that was a little funny, at least conceptually.

The "hero" is basically a stupid man, an embezzler whose children hate him, a widower with no respect for the memory of his dead wife, aside from an acute desire to plunder her reputation for his own nefarious purposes. I hated this character with such venom, I have to stop writing and grab a cup so I can spit out the bile rising in my chest. I wanted to see him beaten, brutalized, dumped in a jail cell for the rest of his life, where he'd end up a broken old man with no teeth, whose pathetic attempts at escape would result in a continual state of solitary confinement - while in the outside world his children would laugh at his fate, and hold parties in honor of the judge who sentenced their father to life without parole. Worse yet, I'd make him immortal, and subject him to and endless loop of KT.

Alas, Dreyfuss and his family weasel their way out of their predicament and end up celebrities. I guess the message of KT is: lie to everyone you know, steal as much as you can. Which is pretty funny when you consider that this is basically a kids' movie. But the insanity of it is that the filmmakers thought they were making a sentimental statement about families sticking together through thick and thin. Ignoring the bitter irony that in order to get this message across, the children in the film committed several felonies, and everyone was rewarded for their crimes.

Regarding performances, Richard Dreyfuss sputters and blathers and generally makes an ass of himself, proving without question that just because you won an Oscar doesn't mean you have any talent to speak of (this means you, Cher). Don't get me wrong— I like, if not love, a lot of Dreyfuss' earliest work. But since about 1982, he's been systematically trying to destroy his career. Guess what? He won.

Meanwhile, Jenna Elfman ("Dharma & Greg") makes a strong case for having her strangled with her own eye stalks. And Lily Tomlin breaks new ground as Dreyfuss' "evil" competitor. By breaking new ground I mean she freaking sucks eggs.

The only player to come out of this unscathed is Loud Bassoon favorite David Ogden Stiers. He really is a fine actor, even in tripe like this, and brings a microscopic iota of dignity to a film that is, on all levels, in all possible ways, in every dimension of time and space, for its makers and viewers alike, completely humiliating. And I, for one, am very, very sick of being humiliated.

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Review by Crimedog