The Case for Herr Heimlich

It’s been a while since I went to see an R18 film, and Choke, while earning an this rating, was no worse than watching a Badabing-based episode of The Sopranos. If trailer for the film gives the impression of a fairly tame film laced with lots of references to the “wild thing”, it is doing a very good job, as that is more or less what you get, with an impressive number of boobies and lots of “discretely done dirty deeds”.

I quite like Sam Rockwell, finding his usual amiable loser persona quite entertaining, if not necessarily lead character material. But in this film, his Victor gets to interact with a bevy of strange and unusual characters, and if ever attention wanes on his performance, the others are more than capable of picking up the slack. In particular, the divine Anjelica Huston gets one of the more interesting roles I have seen her in for a long time, and the flashbacks to her in her trashy glory are remarkable (I would love to know how much (if any) CGI went in to making her look “young”).

The story itself is fun, the dialogue amusing, with no major histrionics (except at important times) and some developments that appear to happen outside the scope of the film but which push things along quite nicely and aren’t too jarring. It is all played for laughs, and despite the rating, the laughs are fairly easy.

Overall, I enjoyed this film and the performances in particular. The one question I came away with though was, considering what passes for entertainment on the telly these days, why was Choke rated R18? I have seen episodes of Outrageous Fortune that were explicit and violent and used harsher language than this film. But then perhaps I have become jaded with age…

Verdict: A pleasant, entertaining film with humour of the naughty kind, Choke was fun, and a lot more accessible than the censorship rating may have indicated. An R13 out of R18.