The Greasy Strangler: The Comedy of Pure Discomfort

There is a particular sound a cinema makes when a film has decided it does not care whether you enjoy it. Half nervous laughter, half the shuffle of people wondering if leaving now would be rude. Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler (2016) produces that sound on an industrial scale, and it produces it on purpose. Eight years on, it has settled onto the small, defiant shelf of films that are easier to admire than to recommend, and I find I admire it more each time I subject a friend to it against their explicit wishes.

A disco tour, a tub of grease

The setup is almost sweet in outline. Big Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels) and his adult son Big Brayan (Sky Elobar) run a walking tour of a city’s disco heritage — a heritage Ronnie appears to have invented on the spot, pointing at ordinary buildings and insisting a Bee Gee once stood there. They share a house, a wardrobe of appalling knitwear, and a diet built almost entirely around grease. When a tourist named Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo) takes the tour and shows an interest in Brayan, the film’s flimsy romantic engine turns over. Father and son begin to compete for her.

Running underneath, barely hidden, is the horror premise the title promises. Someone has been coating themselves head to toe in grease and strangling people in the dark, then visiting a silent car-wash attendant to be hosed clean. The identity of the strangler is the film’s worst-kept secret, and Hosking treats it as such. He is not interested in mystery. He is interested in the texture of two men shouting the same insult at each other for what feels like a geological age.

Hosking, a British director who cut his teeth on shorts and a memorably grim segment of ABCs of Death 2, made the feature under Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision banner, with Ben Wheatley and Andy Starke’s Rook Films also in the mix. That pedigree matters, because The Greasy Strangler is not an amateur accident. It is a precisely engineered machine for discomfort, scored with squelching synth menace by Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons, and shot in a flat, sun-bleached palette that makes every prosthetic look worse than it needs to.

Why the discomfort works

The film’s central technique is repetition past the point of reason. A joke arrives, lands, and then Hosking simply refuses to move on. The word “bullshit,” hurled between father and son, becomes a liturgy. A gag about a potato, a shopkeeper’s mispriced item, an exchange that should last one beat is held for ten. This is the Andy Kaufman principle, the anti-comedy logic that a joke stops being funny, travels through a valley of excruciation, and — if you hold your nerve — comes out the far side as something funnier than it ever was. Hosking is a patient torturer. He knows the exact length of silence that turns an audience against him, and he sits one second past it.

The dialogue does its own strange work. Hosking and co-writer Toby Harvard write speech that lands slightly wrong, as though translated from a language that shares no idioms with English. Characters ask each other the same question twice in a row and receive different answers. Insults escalate through nonsense. The effect is destabilising in a way that pure crudeness never manages, because you cannot get your bearings; the film keeps quietly moving the furniture. That verbal wrongness is the layer critics tend to miss when they file the picture under gross-out, and it is the layer that keeps it interesting on a second watch, once the shock of the grease has worn off.

The prosthetics do similar work in the visual register. The film is full of bodies rendered grotesque by design — sagging, greased, exposed with a cheerful indifference to your comfort. Crucially, none of it is played for shock in the horror sense. It is played flat, deadpan, as though a swollen prosthetic were the most ordinary thing to have in frame. That deadpan is the whole trick. Shock asks for a reaction; deadpan denies you one, and the denial is where the unease lives. You are left holding a response the film will not accept.

What keeps the exercise from collapsing into mere provocation is the strange tenderness underneath. Ronnie and Brayan are monstrous, and they are also lonely, codependent, and genuinely funny in their shared delusion about the disco tour. The film has the shape of a domestic comedy about a father sabotaging his son’s first real chance at happiness. Strip the grease away and you have something close to Steptoe and Son, two men trapped in a house and in each other. The horror is almost incidental scaffolding for a very old story about a parent who cannot let a child leave.

Where the grease comes from

For a film that feels beamed in from nowhere, The Greasy Strangler has a clear ancestry, and tracing it is half the pleasure. The most obvious forebear is John Waters, whose early Baltimore films built an entire aesthetic out of the joyful pursuit of bad taste. Anyone who has sat through the closing horror of Pink Flamingos will recognise the strategy here — the dare, the flatly presented outrage, the refusal to apologise. Hosking has updated it, swapping Waters’s queer transgressive glee for a more clinical, deadpan cruelty, though the lineage runs straight back to Divine and a rented Baltimore house. My longer piece on Pink Flamingos and the art of bad taste maps that tradition in full.

The other tributary is the grubby regional horror-comedy of Troma, where cheapness itself becomes an aesthetic and the human body is a special effect to be abused for laughs. The Greasy Strangler is far more controlled than anything in the Troma catalogue, yet it shares the conviction that a gross-out, held long enough and shot plainly enough, curdles into something genuinely strange. Readers who came up on that grimy VHS shelf will find the connection to Troma’s grubby superhero satire obvious.

The nearest cousin in temperament is Quentin Dupieux, another absurdist who builds entire films around a single deadpan impossibility and then commits to it with a straight face. If you want the intellectual, self-aware wing of this sensibility — comedy about the mechanics of comedy — the tyre-that-kills conceit of Rubber is the natural double bill. Dupieux and Hosking are working the same seam from opposite ends: one cool and conceptual, the other warm and disgusting.

The verdict

The Greasy Strangler is a genuine test, and it is meant to be one. The repetition that some viewers experience as hypnotic, others experience as being held hostage, and both responses are correct. What separates it from lazier shock cinema is craft: the timing is exact, the deadpan never wobbles, and the melancholy under the grease is real enough to give the abrasion a point. This is a film that engineered every off-putting choice it makes. Every awkward silence is placed.

I keep returning to it because it is one of the few comedies that trusts discomfort as a primary tool and knows precisely how to wield it. That trust is rare, and it curdles far more often than it pays off. Here it pays off. Whether you can bear it is a separate question, and one only your own tolerance for a held silence can answer.

If it lands for you, the road out leads to the other films that treat the low budget and the flat gaze as virtues — the deadpan sci-fi of The American Astronaut is a gentler place to recover, a cult oddity built from the same faith in committing fully to an impossible premise.

Spoilers below

The film keeps only one card back, and it plays it early: Big Ronnie is the Greasy Strangler. Hosking barely bothers to hide it, and the reveal is treated as a shrug rather than a twist, which is the point. The plot’s engine is what happens next rather than who did it, and what happens is that Ronnie begins strangling the people his son cares about, Janet included, in order to keep Brayan for himself.

The film’s cruellest structural joke is that Brayan eventually becomes a strangler too. The murderous grease habit is presented as an inheritance, a family trade passed from father to son like the disco tour itself. By the close, the deranged competition over Janet resolves into the pair of them reunited in monstrousness, the outsider eliminated, the codependent household sealed shut again. It is a genuinely bleak ending disguised as a punchline — the son does not escape the father; he grows into him. That final image of the two of them, back together, cleaned and grinning, is the discomfort comedy’s last and best trick: it makes the horror of the setup land only after the laughing has stopped.

For a full plunge into the sensibility this film descends from, Pink Flamingos remains the founding text, and Rubber the sharpest modern companion.