Sometimes a cultural artifact crops up that is so strange that it becomes noteworthy on account of oddball novelty alone. It’s in that light that we present to you news that someone has liberated a truly strange recording from the dusty bins of DVD culture, and placed it on the internet this week for the rest of us to enjoy: A full commentary track for Roger Avary’s prickly and miserable 2002 Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Rules Of Attraction… recorded by prop comic Carrot Top.
You might, very reasonably, ask: In what way was Carrot Top involved in the production of Avary’s film, which follows three college students (James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, and Ian Somerholder) as they unsuccessfully attempt to find happiness with each other? Answer: No way, except that he was asked to record a commentary track for its eventual DVD. (Apocryphal comments attributed to Avary suggest he was trying to execute an elaborate joke on the multiplex audiences who really did not enjoy his movie when it was marketed to them as a teen sex comedy. Ellis, meanwhile, tells a more delightfully spiteful story: He revealed on his podcast several years back that he was so high and drunk while trying to record his own track for the film that the audio was fully unusable, leading producers to hire Carrot Top to replace him as a deliberate insult.)
The upshot of all this is that the Carrot Top track is real, and, as best we can tell, represents a genuine experience of what watching a movie with Carrot Top might be like. Which is to say that it’s fairly awful, but also kind of fascinating, as the man spends the entire movie rating the attractiveness of the women on the screen, making homophobic jokes, and loudly bemoaning, “How come it’s so easy to get laid in this movie?!” (He also gets really excited any time Eric Stoltz is on the screen, in the apparent belief that Stoltz can somehow get him work.) It’s not good, obviously, by any stretch of the imagination. But it is so weird as to be interesting, kind of by default. And now it’s free to run and play on the internet, instead of being locked away on decaying DVDs. Truly, the future is a wondrous place.
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