Starring: Marshall Allman, Vince Vieluf, Natasha Lyonne
Written & Directed By: David Russo
Grade: B+
David Russo makes his feature debut with The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. It’s definitely a strange film, but Russo created the right context for this to really make it work. The characters are extremely likeable, very lively, and charismatic. They’re unique and fun, without them I am not sure everything else would have fallen in to place the way it did.
After putting up with all of the annoyances at work, one day Dorey (Allman), snaps. He literally snaps a girl’s cell phone in half, smashing it to destruction. He gets fired from his high paying job because of this. He still is trying to pay for his school and is struggling just to make rent. So to make some money in the mean time he starts working at Spiffy Jiffy Janitorial Services, a night time service that works through a series of office buildings. There he meets his new co-workers, O.C. (Vieluf), an energetic, but offbeat guy who envisions himself as an artist, the hippy cross dresser owner, and Ethyl and Methyl, two edgy, chaotic lovers.
Soon Dorey get used to things and settles in. One day he finds a cookie in the garbage that he is about to take out. It is still wrapped and it seems alright so Dorey eats it and immediately vomits it back up. Tracy (Lyonne), a product researcher who works in one of the offices in the building sees him doing this. Her company is testing out cookies that have ingredients in them that makes them always warm. She invites Dorey to test some of them out.
At first every cookie tastes disgusting. Later, Tracy tries a different experiment. She leaves sample cookies in the garbage where the janitors find them. Soon they are all completely hooked on them. They do have some bad side effects. The boys always have bad cramps, digestive problems, have salt cravings, and get hallucinations. Dorey tries to tie this all together to figure out what is going on. He saw something blue in the toilet when he started working with the janitorial service, something alive. Dorey suspects that the cookies make you give birth to this blue creature. No one else seems to believe him until a blue creature emerges out of them the way that it did to Dorey. They tape it to prove the wrongs that the company making these cookies did to them.
The acting was phenomenal, really bringing these characters to life. Natasha Lyonne was the only one I was really familiar with. She did well and it was nice to see her in this. She helped put up that barrier in her character. You liked her to an extent, but using the characters that we cared about most as lab rats held that back a little as it was meant to.
Marshall Allman and Vince Vieluf were the real stars of the film. Both of their performances as well as their characters were extremely refreshing. They were very different but worked as great opposites with one another. Marshall Allman as Dorey played the very intelligent, innocent, nice guy. He was also constantly trying out different religions, showing that he is open-minded and still trying to find himself. Vince Vieluf as O.C. is very go with the flow, goofy, and seems to have a slightly skewed vision of reality. We see the film through Dorey’s eyes and O.C. is our loveable idiot that makes everything more fun.
There are a lot of weird visions on screen throughout the movie. This really works after they eat the cookies, connecting them to drugs. They are getting these visions and alternate realities that would happen to someone when they are in a trance from being intoxicated. They are addicted to the cookies like drugs and it is clear they aren’t good for them. This adds to that sense of wrong doing that has been struck on our characters, altering their minds so severely. However, the images that appear outside of the immediate reality of the film itself actually appear before this. It starts from the very beginning, but there it is used to illustrate Dorey’s inner-self since he doesn’t seem completely able to express it. It’s funky and that’s clearly Russo’s style. The context and characters he worked this style around really compliment each other.
It’s always good to find something new and with some of the obscurity of this story, The Immaculate Conception Little Dizzle definitely is that. I have never heard of any other movie about janitors’ love of chemically enhanced cookies that make these men have blue baby creatures, not that I can recall anyway. It’s very different and there was enough likeability in the characters to make us care about them, letting us suspend our belief about the story.
Also, being solely men that have the babies it is quite amusing watching the characters go through this. Once it happens they are so joyful and proud in what they created even though they are angered by how it happened. The scene where they are taping one of their friends pushing the blue baby out of him is definitely one of the funniest. The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is a ton of fun to watch. It’s the little things that really make it so enjoyable. The dialogue is really rich, the characters are fresh, and the story is so crazy that it works.
