By Adam Goetz
Who could resist a chance to screen a movie entitled American Mullet? The name alone was enough to bring a smile to my face, but the fact that “Party In The Back Productions” produced it only heightened my anticipation. I was expecting something in the vein of Spinal Tap, though what I got was far from it.
The film consists of several interviews conducted on a cross-country tour of the u.s. A country bar dj, a lesbian, a biker and a Billy Ray Cyrus look-alike all speak up to defend their beloved hair. And just to show that it wasn’t a biased interviewing process, a number of hairstylists also gave their two cents.
The only amusing part of all of this was that the mullet wearers actually believe they were lookin’ good. They’re so deluded that one guy even refers to his as a "babe magnet." Everyone in the real world knows that the "sho-long" (for short in the front and long in the back) is quite the opposite.
If you do want to look for a deeper meaning, American Mullet does attempt to explore the social consequences of self-expression. But on a more basic level, it displays people with varying degrees of mulletude for you to laugh at and, in some instances, pity. However, the overall hilarity of the movie does wear off after the first five minutes of "holy shit, look at that guy’s hair." It could have easily been edited down to a lean 15-minute feature and still kept the message, which was, essentially, that no matter what you call the hairstyle, in the end, it is still sad.
In the Off the Beaten Path category, this film plays Oct. 5 at 5:00 p.m. at CSIF (Currie Barracks).