RUBBER (2010)

Although all the dialogue may be in English, make no mistake, this film is foreign.  If the credits full of French names didn't tip you off, you could probably figure it out once the action starts.  Two stories blend together: one is about an audience watching the events of the film from a distance with binoculars.  This story does interact with the other story occasionally, but its mostly isolated and sort of a modern day meta-version of a Greek chorus.  The other story, and by far the stronger one and the one with deservedly more screen time, is the tale of a rubber tire cast off somewhere in desert, which suddenly and inexplicably gains sentience, malevolence, and telekinesis (another character calls it 'psycho-kinetic').

The tire is a wonderfully absurd protagonist, with long wordless stretches of him (everyone in the movie calls it 'he') just rolling around and learning his abilities.  He starts with a water bottle that he rolls over, before quickly moving up to scorpions, rabbits and even larger prey.  Make no mistake that the tire is the hero of this film: when he vibrates intensely and causes a cute, little bunny rabbit to explode, the music turns upbeat and joyful.  It seems strange at first that the opening credits for a movie about a killer tire feature five credited special effects artists, but once the tire discovers his ability to make things explode it becomes clear that they were not over-staffed.

The sequence where the tire confronts a human at a gas station is far tenser than it has any right to be.  The tire story contains a number of traditional elements that are well-executed, like the monster catching sight of himself in a mirror and being horrified, or the little boy that sees whats going on but nobody believes him.  It's a credit to the crisp, clean direction, the excellent pacing, the effectively energetic music, and the generally well polished nature of the film that the killer tire works at all, let alone pretty damn well.  The tire is definitely the breakout star, and such an offbeat element that the other bizarre flourishes seem almost unnecessarily.

The characters with binoculars commenting on the action wear out their welcome quickly, even Fat Neil from Community and even a man in a wheelchair played by Wings Hauser, a character actor with a lengthy credits list, an awesome name, and a small part in "Tales from the Hood'.  The sheriff who eventually shows up to investigate the tire murders is well aware that he is in a movie, and talks to the audience about the importance of the 'no reason' factor in films, and tries to demonstrate his fictional nature to his confused deputies.  A tire coming to life and blowing people up is already so damn weird, I think it could have worked better as a solitary story without all the other elements.

On the episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes the voice of the new Itchy & Scratchy character Poochie, he suggests to the producers that whenever Poochie isn't in the room, all the other characters should ask 'Where's Poochie?'  I like to use the term the 'Poochie Rule' when one character in a film is so captivating and crowd-pleasing that if he's not onscreen the movie suffers from his absence so much that the other characters might as well just stand around asking where the bloody hell he is.  The lovable, murderous rubber tire from this film definitely qualifies for the Poochie Rule, and despite other surreal distractions, his journey from nowhere to somewhere is an enjoyably eccentric dissection of the slasher films with enough head splattering and clever observations about the nature of the genre to satisfy anyone who would even consider watching a film about a killer tire in the first place.