For some reason I cannot really grasp, I really enjoyed the travails of poor Little Corey Gorey. The movie is just strangely compelling, combining both humor and a dab of horror in an odd way I found fascinating.

Who is Little Corey Gorey? There's a very faint Michael J. Fox quality to him -- I say this only because he sometimes appears to be about 35 years old to me, yet his character is a 9th-grader. With his family background, it is more than possible he was left back a few years in school, though. He apparently grew up with a nice father who made the disastrous decision to marry an overweight, obnoxiously loud, thoroughly disgusting woman and then died, leaving Corey with the stepmother and older stepbrother from hell. Corey is basically a slave, forced to do all of the work at home in between prolonged bouts of awful physical and mental abuse.

When his stepbrother steals his Ozzy tickets and then brags about showing the object of Corey's affections a really, really good time after the concert, Corey gets mad and finally has a go at the guy and, quite by accident, dear stepbrother's hand is sliced off as pretty as you please (the camera cuts away pretty quickly, so you might have to watch the big moment a couple of times in order to fully enjoy it). Corey then decides to hog-tie his mother to the couch and starve her to death, and he is so happy with this decision that he dances around the house with a pair of panties on his head. Things get a little weird at this point, as Corey's dream girl moves in temporarily, a magical pound of cocaine is searched for endlessly, some killer weed is smoked, a dealer shows up demanding money and a few people basically beg to be murdered. The ending is quite acceptable, although somewhat predictable.

The funniest thing about this movie is the way that everyone ignores the stepmother as she lies gagged and tied up on the couch. When Corey and his girl throw a party to raise money, they just stick a sign behind mom's head saying something like "Do not untie me, or I will call the cops." Two girls do take notice of her, but the only action they take is to give her a makeover. As for Corey, I couldn't help liking the poor dumb guy, even after he turned to a life of ill-thought-out crime. He basically just lets a bad situation spin further and further out of control, but the laughs inspired by his mistakes and the wonderful temper tantrums that duly follow turn this movie into a dark comedy well worth watching. This is the cinematic equivalent to Frankenstein's monster -- its individual parts are rather unseemly if not rotten; put all of these parts together, though, and you get an ugly, fascinating creature that you can't take your eyes off of.

I guess this would be considered a horror movie, but I would call it a dark comedy. Oddly enough, the movie does seem to make an important statement, and herein lies the real horror of this story. The film goes out of its way to show neighbors up and down Corey's block shake their heads and carry their children indoors whenever the Goreys are going at it. The terrible things said and done to Corey by his really loud stepmother are no secret to anyone within a one-mile radius, yet no one takes the initiative to contact authorities in response to such obvious evidence of abuse. Herein lies the lesson imparted by the tragic story of Little Corey Gorey.

- Rambles
written by Daniel Jolley
published 19 April 2003