By Robert Scucci
| Published
I mentioned a while back that Chuck Palahnuik’s novel, Survivor, would make a great movie after learning that such a project was once in development before getting shelved decades ago, and I think I found the next best thing with 2024’s Let’s Start a Cult. While both intellectual properties end up telling wildly stories, they both have very similar setups that involve a lone survivor of a cult suicide who needs to figure out his next moves, with morbidly hilarious consequences. Once I learned this film existed, I was excited to the point of saying “Pass me the Kool-Aid,” but I’m also a bit disappointed because such a promising concept fails to stick the landing.
I’m not saying that Let’s Start a Cult isn’t a solid proof of concept, but sometimes there’s such a thing as too much shtick that will end up taking you out of the movie entirely.
The Initial Falling Out
Let’s Start a Cult introduces its audience to Chip Harper, (Stavros Halkias), the kind of character that is often referred to as a “stoned slacker.” Chip is the problematic member of a death cult that’s about to enjoy its day of transcendence in which each member poisons themselves after a series of celebrations before passing on to the next plane of existence. Tired of Chip’s childish antics, cult leader William Davenport (Wes Haney) instructs him to mail a video tape of the cult’s activities to the press while he and the rest of his followers follow through with their ceremony, leaving him behind as the sole survivor.
Getting distracted by a convenience store slurpy, Chip forgets to mail the tape to the press, and decides to go back home to live with his parents as if he had not been living with the cult for the past several years.
Chip’s Going To Do It Right This Time
Realizing that his regular life is wholly unsatisfying, Chip has difficulty assimilating as a regular, functioning member of society. Let’s Start a Cult shows its namesake when the news informs Chip that the bodies of his fellow former cult members were found, except for William who is now considered a fugitive wanted for the mass murder in question. Chip manages to track down William, who’s now living in the woods and occasionally appearing in public dressed as a clown so he can make money working at children’s parties, and decides that it’s time to start a new cult – one that does things right this time around.
Chip and William don’t get along because the former is a reckless oaf who’s a slave to his impulses, and the latter is a calculating cult leader who wants to follow a very specific process of recruitment and indoctrination in order to successfully transcend.
It doesn’t take long for Chip to quickly recruit several enthusiastic members, prompting William to take the reins in Let’s Start a Cult. Chip, who at first thinks William was reincarnated to conduct some unfinished business, realizes that he’s always been a pawn in his game, and will ultimately take the fall for the original mass suicide if he doesn’t figure out how to clear his name.
Great Raunchy Humor, But In The Wrong Place
As promising as Let’s Start a Cult’s premise sounded before I decided to give it a go, I feel as disappointed as a recently departed cult member who wakes up on the other side without receiving the expected celestial reward for sacrificing his life, and here’s why.
Stavros Halkias is a great comedian who knows how to read the room, and whenever I see his giant head pop up on my feed, I’ll check out what he has to say because it’ll probably make me laugh. He has a larger-than-life personality, but that personality doesn’t necessarily translate well into dark comedy territory if overdone. For every moment in Let’s Start a Cult that was genuinely hilarious for situational reasons, Halkias turns up to 11 when I could have honestly used him at a two or three.
The moments in Let’s Start a Cult that made me laugh the hardest involve Halkias being so gullible and clueless as he tries to be the cult leader he always wanted to be, but they were immediately undermined by scenes involving an excessive amount of toilet humor and low-brow comedy (like a fully naked Chip getting manhandled by a former female wrestling champion named Dorota) that would probably work well in literally any other context. I’m not saying that there isn’t a time and place for a healthy amount of raunch, but in this case it felt like most of these jokes were an afterthought, and interchangeably shoe-horned into the screenplay as a means to pad its runtime.
But still, Let’s Start a Cult has a handful of moments that are genuinely hilarious, and if you have the patience for a comedy with a promising premise that doesn’t quite execute as intended, then you can stream the title on Hulu as of this writing.
