16 Sep The Yoga Way

Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers is like a comical trip through a Canadian looking
glass into an shlocky high-school horror monster flick.  Messy, visceral,
and just plain fun. It delivers the goods while managing to keep pace with
itself, no mean feat given how out there some of the content gets.  It’s
not often that one can honestly be surprised by a movie these days in the
creative wasteland of reboots and remakes, but you can’t fault this
particular film for being unoriginal.

Longtime Kevin Smith fans will find much to love about the ever so
slightly off Canada based cinematic universe that was first featured in
Tusk. With a slew of callbacks and references to Smith’s other works, the
most obvious of course being the titular Yoga Hosers themselves, Colleen C.
(Lily-Rose Depp) and Colleen M. (Harley Quinn Smith), now being upgraded
from cameo to main characters. However one doesn’t need to have watched the
decidedly dour Tusk in order to enjoy the surreal trip that Yoga Hosers
offers. After all, does a film with a premise like miniature Canadian
bratwurst Nazi clones or “Bratzis” as it were being battled by high school
sophomores with the power of yoga really need more in the way of a set-up?
There are a few places in which the film stumbled slightly with jokes that
were a bit more groan inducing than funny, though the excellent performances
by both Lily-Rose and Harley Quinn manage to keep the ride smooth enough
overall that I hardly noticed.

If not for nothing the addition of the French Canadian “legendary”
detective Guy Lapointe (Johnny Depp) who recruits the teens into helping
him with this case adds a greatly needed straight man and perhaps more
importantly an adult to the otherwise stereotypical cellphone addicted teen
dynamic. The one real complaint I would say I have with the film is that
the scenes with our Yoga Hosers and their bumbling man hunter partner are
noticeably better and I wish that there had been a bit more of it. The
other non-teen character of note, the girl’s Yoga Instructor Yogi Bayer
(Justin Long), delivers some of the movie’s best lines. However he does so
by adding to the wackiness rather than subtracting from it and is cut from
quite a different cloth.

With a villain that ultimately just hates the haters aka critics and is
obviously just a touch near and dear to Kevin Smith’s heart, expository
dialogue set over black and white footage of Canadian Nazis goose stepping
in the streets, to a subplot about Satan worshiping upperclassmen this
movie delivers on just about everything it promises and then some. If you
can stomach a bit of raunchiness and don’t mind your heroines having a
penchant for the likes of Snapchat and Twitter alongside their charm and
spunk, then this is a movie that will leave you laughing.

Watch Yoga Hosers exclusively on FlixFling!

This guest blog was written by Robert Marcin.