“What the f*ck is going on!”
Somebody yells this a third of the way into “Never Change!” the latest straight-to-Hulu comedy from Gen-Z teensploitation company American High. I was asking myself that question right from the first frame, which begins with angry movers throwing objects (including an urn) into a truck while a radio announcer says, “Pizza Hut: We’ve cleared the dead bodies, and our crust is sometimes literally stuffed with shit.” (Food tasting like excrement becomes one of the film’s many questionable running gags.)
Acknowledging its aggressively absurd, obnoxiously obscene tone from the jump, “Never Change!” is one of those deadpan-yet-deranged comedies where everyone acts like a foul-mouthed, damn-near-sociopathic lunatic… but in a supposedly funny way. It’s all set around the thirtysomething losers and loners who, due to a legal loophole, must return to their high school to finish out their senior year. (Damn that tornado for decimating half the school and cutting that year short!)
In the opening minutes, we meet the sad-sack principal players. The person getting her stuff moved/damaged is Amelia Nadler (Jo Firestone), who’s just broken up with her DJ-wannabe ex (John Early) and has to come back to a student body that continually refuses to remember her. Chief among them is Tedi Mayo (Carmen Christopher), a former party animal-turned-family man who runs a greasy dive bar/restaurant. Aimless, irresponsible slacker Sunny Football (co-writer John Reynolds) reignites a fling with high-school sweetheart–and the closest thing this movie has to a semi-functioning adult–Katie Cartwright (Sofia Black-D’Elia), a local anchor with a malaprop-dropping fiance (Rudy Pankow). Rounding out the crew is Curtis Eldridge (Gary Richardson), a just-fired ad exec who keeps getting flashbacks involving aliens. They’ll be heading to a school where the faculty (led by a subdued Ana Gasteyer as the school principal/Nadler’s mom) is just as messed-up as they are.
Picture “Strangers with Candy” if all the students were Amy Sedaris’ middle-aged, ex-junkie Jerri Blank, and you pretty much have “Change.” (As a possible nod to the show/movie, “Strangers” supporting player Maria Thayer plays an inappropriately horny teacher.) And just like “Strangers,” “Change” is the work of East Coast comedians/writers/improvisers who enjoy throwing out profane, anarchic jokes and gags with the straightest of faces. Most of the cast have appeared on “Search Party,” that darkly-comic show that answered the age-old question, “What if a murder mystery was populated by buffoonish, self-absorbed millennials?”
Somehow wrangled together by co-writer/director Marty Schousboe, “Change” is mostly filled with relentlessly transgressive bits and gags that are more unnerving than laugh-inducing. (Yes, there is a school-shooting joke.) While I have no doubt a lot of this was improvised, I also get the sense that this was a “there are no bad ideas” production. This has to explain why “Change” slams you with so much jarring nonsense. There were a few times I found myself impressed at the sheer lunacy of it all, like during the scenes where the school’s foul-tempered theatre director (Topher Grace in an unwieldy wig) puts on a play (with Patti Harrison and “Severance”’s Zach Cherry in the cast) that’s really a confession of his serial-killer spree.
By the second half, “Never Change!” awkwardly throws some moments of sincerity in the mix. If this was their attempt of subverting the high-school movie, having its grown-but-emotionally stunted characters literally going back to ground zero to figure out what went wrong, then they do it in the most extremely ludicrous way possible.
While I found “Never Change!” to be a baffling mess, I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the “Wet Hot American Summer” of the Gen Alpha crowd years from now.
