--- description: Kevin Smith's horror-comedy turns a snide podcaster into a chubby sea mammal and lets Depp sport a goofy French-Canadian accent title: Tusk Movie Review: Johnny Depp Cameo image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt681bcd6abe4891f3/6986a3a5d0b6f202013061db/tusk.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) ## Entertainment Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [movies](/tag/movies/) ## movies Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # _Tusk_: The Human Walrus, the Crazy Carpenter and Hey, Isn't That Johnny Depp? by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Sep 16, 2014 10:00 PM CUT  Tusk\_1088.dng Tusk\_1088.dngA24 Films by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) ## Richard Corliss Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Sep 16, 2014 10:00 PM CUT The press notes for _Tusk_ describe writer-director-editor Kevin Smith as “the fat guy who got thrown off the plane. He also made _Clerks_ once.” That’s the whole biography, which suggests Smith’s comfort level with his renown as the jolly nerd who still lives in the basement of his fertile, fetid mind. His side jobs as comic-book savant and salesman, energetic podcaster with his friend Scott Mosier ([_SModcast_](http://smodcast.com/ "undefined")) and genial raconteur in many media — all that, plus the notoriety of being told by Southwest Airlines that he was [too fat to fly](http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1968309,00.html "undefined") — have obscured Smith’s status as the loopiest and most engaging indie filmmaker of the 1990s. He scored mightily with three of his first four features (_Clerks_, _Chasing Amy_ and [_Dogma_](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,992560,00.html%20 "undefined")), and even _Mallrats_ misfired in the right direction. Smith turned 30 in 2000, the year of _Dogma_, and for most of this century he’s been coasting. A sequel to _Clerks_, a pair of _Jay and Silent Bob_ comedies featuring Smith’s and Jason Mewes’ character from _Clerks_, two romantic comedies (_Jersey Girl_, _Zack and Miri Make a Porno_) that came off as pale shades of _Chasing Amy —_ it’s as if he were happy entering middle age with retreads of his early prime. Smith’s one stab at a medium-budget movie, _Cop Out_, only underlined the suspicion of his fans that he was too indie to sell out. **(READ: Richard Schickel’s** [**review of** **_Chasing Amy_**](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,986157,00.html%20 "undefined")**)** _Tusk_, at least, is different. It’s a movie adaptation, not of his first movies, but of [_SModcast_ No. 259](http://smodcast.com/episodes/the-walrus-and-the-carpenter/ "undefined"), in which he and Mosier spitballed the plot for a horror-comedy. See, these two guys — smug Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) and sweet, furry Teddy Craft (Haley Joel Osment, 15 years after _The Sixth Sense_) — have this podcast called the Not-See Party. In each episode, Wallace confronts some YouTube eccentric, the sort whose embarrassments show up on _Tosh.0_, and brings the evidence to Teddy, who has not seen it. Trekking up to Winnipeg to interview a kid who sliced off his leg in homage to Quentin Tarantino’s _Kill Bill_ movies, Wallace finds that the boy has died of his wound. Desperate for a story, he visits the remote Manitoban enclave of one Howard Howe (Michael Parks), who promises stories of “a lifetime of adventures.” A friendly geezer in a wheelchair, Howe has the diction of a Civil War–era orator: he quotes Tennyson (“Nature, red in tooth and claw”) and calls Wallace “a rapscallion of the highest order.” He also spins colorful recollections (pictured in black and white) of sharing the D-Day invasion with Papa Hemingway and, more pointedly, of having his life saved in the Bering Sea by a friendly walrus that Howe calls Tusk. “I think the real savage animals are the humans,” he tells Wallace. And he proves it by — no spoiler alert needed, since everyone who has heard of _Tusk_ knows what happens next, and few people would go if they didn’t want to see it — transforming his visitor into an _Odobenus rosmarus_. Wallace is to be a walrus, and Howe the carpenter. Horror movies love the distortion and recombination of body parts, as in _Frankenstein_, _Freaks_ and _The Fly_ (to name just some _F_ titles). In pulp form, these films muse on human decay and the outrages of nature. Science wants to create the perfect man, the ideal mate; that was the goal of surgeon Antonio Banderas in [Pedro Almodóvar’s _The Skin I Live In_](http://entertainment.time.com/2011/10/13/the-skin-i-live-in-almodovars-human-centipede/%20 "undefined"), and it was as doomed to grotesque failure, to a mockery of noble intentions, as any story about a man who would play God. **(FIND:** **_Frankenstein_** **,** **_Freaks_** **and** **_The Fly_** **on the** [**all-TIME Top 25 Horror Movies list**](http://entertainment.time.com/2007/10/29/top-25-horror-movies/slide/all/%20 "undefined")**)** Howe has a more modest, and more depraved, experiment: to turn a human being into an animal. Not quite like the three-person arthropod in Tom Six’s _Human Centipede_ trilogy — just the barely-living replica of his favorite beast. He sews Wallace’s arms to his side, stuffs tusks into his cheeks and encases his subject in a welter of blubber. (Kudos to the Wallace-walrus contrived by Robert Kurtzman, whose special-effects work dates back to the original _Evil Dead_, _Halloween_ and _Nightmare on Elm Street_ franchises.) In the process, Howe makes Wallace into something he had never been: a poignant creature. Nice as it would be to herald _Tusk_ as a return to Smith’s bold early period, the movie has a lurching tone and an airless atmosphere. It rarely jumps to life off the screenplay page — it’s not so much lazy as insufficiently inflected. The 74-year-old Parks, nearly a half-century past his _Then Came Bronson_ studly surliness, gives cogent readings of Howe’s literary gaseousness, and Long makes Wallace a most convincing modern A-hole who almost deserves his punishment. But their scenes together have the tentative feeling of a first take. Genesis Rodriguez, as Wallace’s abiding girlfriend Ally, gets more feeling into a single-take sobbing scene. The other no-need-for-a-spoiler-alert _Tusk_ nugget is the appearance by Johnny Depp as French-Canadian detective Guy Lapointe, who has long been tracking “this serial killer who brings blood and death.” (Tarantino turned down the role, so Smith had to settle for one of the biggest stars on earth.) The performance has the extravagance of some major Depp portrayals, like Ed Wood and Jack Sparrow, but during his 10 or so minutes on screen you are less likely to think, Wow, Johnny Depp is great in that role!, than, Hey, that’s Johnny Depp! He has brought along Lily-Rose Depp, his daughter with Vanessa Paradis, for a couple of brief scenes that display her astounding seraphic beauty. May she grow into a major film artist and never be walrusized. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3387204/tusk-movie-review/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3387204/tusk-movie-review/"},"headline":"Tusk: The Human Walrus, the Crazy Carpenter and Hey, Isn't That Johnny Depp?","datePublished":"2014-09-16T22:00:32.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-21T10:12:55.267Z","description":"Kevin Smith's horror-comedy turns a snide podcaster into a chubby sea mammal and lets Depp sport a goofy French-Canadian accent","url":"https://time.com/3387204/tusk-movie-review/","keywords":["movies","Johnny Depp"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt681bcd6abe4891f3/6986a3a5d0b6f202013061db/tusk.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt681bcd6abe4891f3/6986a3a5d0b6f202013061db/tusk.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"TUSK","caption":"TUSK","creditText":"A24 Films","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3387204/tusk-movie-review/","name":"Tusk: The Human Walrus, the Crazy Carpenter and Hey, Isn't That Johnny Depp?"}}]}] ```