The Special

Carl Rivers • Nov 9 2021
  • At least The Crypt Keeper would have been clever enough to call it a "gory hole."
  • Horror
  • Released in 2020
  • Directed by B. Harrison Smith
  • Written by James Newman, Mark Steensland
  • Starring Davy Raphaely, Dave Sheridan, Sarah French
  • Length: 94 min
  • Rating: N/A

A bland dork develops a morbid fascination with a wooden box after he sticks his junk in it. I wasn't even sure this piece of shit warranted a review at all, but that one-sentence summary is so ridiculous while also being 100% accurate, I had to share it.

The movie opens with our sexually adventurous hero, Jerry, drowning his sorrows in a bar with his friend Mike. Jerry's convinced his wife is cheating on him. Mike suggests he return the favor. He takes Jerry to Zhora, a brothel madam fronting as a fortune teller. Mike tells Zhora to give Jerry "the special." Since the special only costs sixty bucks, I predicted Jerry had an unenthusiastic handjob in his future.

Zhora locks him in a room. He's a little surprised to be the only one there. No prostitute waiting to give him whatever the special is. Just a black box with a hole in it. An arrow points to the hole with the instructions "Stick it in here." And get this: the son of a bitch actually does it. Jerry's dalliance with the box is so transcendent, he goes back to the brothel and steals it, killing the madam in the process.

We eventually get to see what's inside the box that makes it so magical. It manages to be simultaneously gross and uninteresting. Sure, it's slimy and nasty, but so is a drain clog.

Sarah French plays Jerry's wife. I have trouble imagining any actress being excited to play a woman whose husband two-times her with a crate full of loads. It turns out she wasn't even cheating on him in the first place, but by then he's too enthralled with the box to salvage his marriage. She confronts him at the hotel where he's stashing the box like a kept woman. Once again, Jerry commits murder to protect the new object of his affection.

The rest of the movie is Jerry neglecting everything else in his life so he can spend all his time banging the world's most featureless sex toy. Of course it ends badly for him. How else could it end? He marries the box and goes on a couples cruise with Yurii Tolochko?

There's some unconvincing body horror that seems to imply that the box is dissolving Jerry from the inside out. Jerry makes a valiant effort to hold his organs together with industrial staples. There's a subplot about a detective investigating Zhora's murder that ultimately goes nowhere. The last scene hints that the detective will be the box's next victim. Because no man alive can resist a wooden box with a hole in it.

3 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.

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