Let’s Start a Cult opens on grainy camcorder footage of the members of a suicide cult being interviewed about why they believe they’re “ready to transcend.” One at a time, they tell their off-camera leader, William (Wes Haney), about the profound lessons they’ve learned from him in preparation for their big day. “This tree that we’re on is burning and it’s telling us to get off,” says one stoically. “In my heart, I know we’re meant to be so much more,” says another. Cut to Chip, played by comedian Stavros Halkias, Baltimore accent in full effect: “Because of your teachings, I convinced the Chinese lady with dementia I was her son,” he says. “I got, like, $13,000 out of her before she realized I didn’t actually know how to speak Mandarin; I was just kind of doing the sounds.” At the bottom of the screen, the recording time-stamps the interview to May 24, 2000.
If this were a faithful period piece, Chip would do an off-color impersonation of this lady rather than just say he did “the sounds,” but his dirtbag irreverence serves as a throwback to that era’s comedy movies nonetheless. Let’s Start a Cult shares some DNA with 2004’s Dodgeball through its harebrained plot uniting a ragtag group and 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite in the way its comedy flows freely from the quirks of its loser characters. It even has a comedic sex scene like 2000’s Road Trip or 1999’s American Pie. It’s deeply silly, like the character-based comedies that were popular before Judd Apatow’s humanistic stories influenced nearly every comedy movie that got green-lit, before the industry’s turning point when even these stopped getting made.
Directed by Ben Kitnick, who co-wrote the movie alongside Halkias and Haney, the plot of Let’s Start a Cult is shaggy by design: Annoyed by his obnoxious behavior, Chip’s cult performs their poison ritual without him, which kicks off a series of events where a defeated Chip returns to his parents’ house, sees on the news that William is still alive and on the run from the law, tracks him down, and blackmails him into helping him start a new cult. Their subsequent road trip to recruit new members, which comprises the bulk of the movie, is little more than an excuse to introduce a gang of endearing oddballs and drop them into various settings where they can exchange loose improvised dialogue and get up to high jinks.
That’s how we end up at the apartment of rejected military hopeful Tyler (Eric Rahill), whom William correctly surmises is a vulnerable target to bring into the fold; Chip and Tyler play Nintendo 64 while Tyler’s not-fiancée, played by Zuri Salahuddin (“You can’t call someone your fiancée if they say no!”), has loud, animalistic sex with a cameo’ing Joe Pera in the next room. It’s also how we get a slo-mo montage reminiscent of the gas-station scene in Zoolander where Chip, William, Tyler, and new cult recruit Diane (Katy Fullan) paint a car with house paint; it ends with Chip whimsically throwing a bucket of paint in William’s eye and nearly blinding him. How else are they supposed to disguise their car from the cops other than by haphazardly and conspicuously repainting it baby blue?
At the center of it all is Halkias as Chip, milking every line delivery for all its worth by imbuing it with the perfect blend of swaggering man-child petulance and wounded ego. In one scene, he tries to reiterate the obvious lie he told his parents to explain why he’d disappeared from their lives to join a cult: “For the last time, Mom, I was training to be a karate champion in Tokyo, but the day before the big championship, my sensei betrayed me and stole my beautiful girlfriend, Akiko. I was too heartbroken to fight, and that’s why I lost! Doesn’t anyone fucking listen to me in this house?!” In another scene, he works himself into a frenzy talking about the outcome of a professional wrestling match from 19 years earlier and laments, “God, that thing was rigged!”
You don’t need to squint too hard watching Halkias’s performance to see echoes of Danny McBride, whose work is an obvious reference point in Chip’s construction. Like Fred Simmons in The Foot Fist Way, Chip’s misguided blustering functions as a subtle commentary on the absurdities of masculinity, and none of his stabs at charisma ever land enough to make you lose sight of the fact that the joke is on him. (The same can’t be said for the comedy in Shane Gillis’s Netflix sitcom Tires, in which Halkias also appeared this year.) But there’s also a pathos to the character that makes his queasy deal easier to stomach. Sometimes, he is just a juvenile blowhard, but just as often, he’s acting out of insecurity, an inability to process his emotions, or a desperate desire to connect. It’s why the movie’s ending, when Chip finds a loving home with his cult recruits turned friends, conveys genuine heart. As much as you wouldn’t want to hang out with this guy, it’s nice to see him get a win.
In his 2018 MasterClass, Apatow discussed the value of writing comedies as dramas, then working backwards to introduce jokes. “It really doesn’t help to think of these stories as comedy stories,” he said. “The problem with a lot of comedies is they’re serving a comedic premise primarily, and they don’t really have a reason to exist.” His movies have been knocked consistently for being too long and ambitious. Let’s Start a Cult, meanwhile, takes the opposite approach: It starts with a comic premise, then works backwards to introduce drama. It doesn’t have a reason to exist except as a vehicle for jokes, and it’s all the better for it.
