Movie Review: 'Heckle' starring Steve Guttenberg

It’s almost hard to believe that at one time, Steve Guttenberg was a major Hollywood star. Coming off of his terrifically fun role in Police Academy in 1984, Guttenberg became a highly marketable talent. He got more than sequel out of The Police Academy movies, to declining interest each time and managed to squander the significant goodwill he’d accrued in Police Academy, a movie many people still love today.

To illustrate the state of Guttenberg’s career today, he’s playing a supporting role in a movie that I guarantee most of you reading this have not heard of and definitely won’t watch. The movie is called Heckle and it features nothing of what made Guttenberg, ever so briefly, a bankable movie star. Heckle is a low budget horror movie in which he plays a comedian whose murder sets off a series of events that lead up to the release of a biopic about Guttenberg's character.

Heckle actually stars Guy Coombes as famed comedian Joe Johnson. Joe is getting his big break at movies with his starring role as Ray Kelly in a new biopic of the famed comedian whose murder set this plot in motion. In flashback, we meet Ray Kelly, played by Guttenberg, as a bullying, abrasive, jerk whose star status made him feel entitled to be able to berate and belittle anyone he crossed paths with. It’s no wonder that he became so hated that someone wanted him dead, he seemed to court the vile vitriol of his audience.

Joe is set to play Ray despite looking nothing like him and despite appearing to have a completely different approach to stand up comedy. We do get to see Joe on stage and it’s not particularly impressive. It takes a turn toward even worse when Joe is confronted by a heckler (Clark Gable III), who takes his heckling to the extreme. The heckler chases Joe off-stage, calls his home, and makes threats against his life. Regardless of that however, Joe’s friends encourage him to ignore the heckler and get on with celebrating his big break at a party at his girlfriend, Laura’s (Helena Antonio) country home.

Naturally, the heckler follows and a slasher movie plot unfolds in the most predictable and rote fashion. Joe’s friends each line up to be victims by wandering off alone, having sex outdoors, and the like. Heckle is not here to re-invigorate the slasher genre. Heckle is a lazy exercise in slasher tropes intended to build toward a big twist and a reveal. Sadly, the twist and the reveal are each so silly and convoluted that they build little to no narrative momentum.

Heckle was directed with all of the skill and subtlety of a child wielding a chainsaw. The constantly moving camera and the ham-fisted use of flashbacks are just two examples of the ineptitude of this derivative slasher movie. Apparently someone behind the scenes thought that the best way to try and hide the low budget and deep flaws of Heckle was to constantly keep the camera moving in a dizzying and deeply unnecessary fashion. Aside from turning the camera off, nothing was going to hide the flaws in this misbegotten horror flick.

Poor Steve Guttenberg. I imagine he made this movie for the paycheck. I can’t imagine that anything in this material or this character was appealing to him. At one point the movie has a scene where it is Guttenberg on stage in his stand up persona, berating a teenage heckler for an interminable amount of time. There are no jokes told, no real insults, just a grown man in an ill-fitting tux and a terrible wig, yelling various swears at a gaunt teenager.

This is intended to provide the motivation for the man who eventually murdered Ray Kelly and while it certainly would provide such a motivation, it also goes on so long that we in the audience come to understand why the Kelly character is killed. We aren’t supposed to sympathize with the killer, but the unending, overbearing amount of abuse that Kelly hurls at this young man makes us almost have to sympathize with the teenager even as we know he’s going to commit a vile series of murders.

Some might call that a transgressive take on the slasher genre, trying to make us sympathize with the killer, but the reality is that the makers of Heckle are simply clumsy. They didn’t intend to make their killer sympathetic, they just didn’t know how to stage and end the scene in a place that made narrative sense. It’s a general lack of skill and care that lead us to have no one to fully root for or concern ourselves with in Heckle.

Heckle arrives for On-Demand rental services on March 8th, 2022.