Disguised Depp acts in Manitoba-set flick

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This article was published 08/09/2014 (4413 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — The 2014 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival is showcasing two horror comedies — The Editor and Teen Lust — from Manitoba this week.

In addition to them, a third gruesome dark comedy premièred Saturday night that happens to be set in Manitoba, starring Justin Long, Michael Parks and… well… let’s just say an actor who looks an awful lot like Johnny Depp.

Tusk, the new horror film from director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats), was actually filmed in North Carolina, but is set almost entirely in Manitoba: Winnipeg and the Interlake municipality of Bifrost, (which, for the sake of the film, is referred to more as a town than a municipality).

Long stars as Wallace, a Los Angeles podcaster frustrated by an abortive search for “the Kill Bill kid,” a samurai sword-wielding Winnipeg youth who became a viral video star after accidentally mutilating himself on YouTube. While in Winnipeg, he reads a notice in a bar from Parks’s retired seaman Howard Howe that compels him to a remote Interlake mansion. There, Wallace becomes a victim of the crazed, walrus-obsessed killer. Howe, it turns out, has highly unconventional notions of inter-species relations, not to mention surgical procedures.

Wallace’s absence is noted by his girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) and his podcasting partner (Haley Joel Osment), who launch their own search with the eventual help of eccentric Quebec homicide investigator Guy LaPointe. In the film, the character of LaPointe is credited as being played by “Guy LaPointe,” but despite the putty nose and crossed eyes, it is clearly Depp.

After a question-and-answer session following the midnight screening at the Ryerson University campus, Smith answered the question: Why Winnipeg?

“I visited there once with Jason,” Smith said, referring to his friend and frequent acting partner Jason Mewes, who worked in the city playing a satanic school janitor in the series Todd and the Book of Pure Evil.

“Winnipeg is the coldest place I’ve ever been,” Smith said. “It just captured my imagination.”

Tusk is the first of a planned True North Trilogy of film projects set in Canada for Smith, a longtime Canuck-o-phile. After the screening, he announced his second one would be titled Yoga Hosers, featuring two female Winnipeg convenience store clerks seen in Tusk, played by Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith and Depp’s daughter Lily-Rose Depp.

There has been no official word on where they will be shooting.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca