"Fried Barry" a freaky-deaky experience unlike anything else

Fried Barry (2021)

“Fried Barry” might be one of the weirdest movies ever made. And that’s no hyperbole. Okay, so it’s definitely one of the weirdest movies about a South African heroin addict becoming an alien pod person. It’s also saying something when the movie’s own creator, debuting writer-director Ryan Kruger (who extends his 2017 short to feature-length here), credits his baby as “A Ryan Kruger Thing.” Thing just about fits to generally describe “Fried Barry,” a freaky-deaky, wild-ass ride for the willing and the adventurous — and that’s a compliment to both asses and roller coasters. Somehow, it rides entirely on a singular, experiential wavelength, similar to Jim Hosking’s gonzo midnight-movie curio “The Greasy Strangler” but made slightly more palatable, even when it’s making your skin crawl. It's unlike anything else out there, and for better or worse, you, too, will feel fried. 

Cape Town native Gary Green, with a one-of-a-kind face not unlike Michael Berryman or Neville Archambault, plays Barry, a scuzzy Cape Town native who’s always on a bender and chasing the dragon. He’s somehow a father and husband, albeit not a very good one. When Barry gets abducted by aliens, an alien being with Barry’s skin hits the streets like a fish out of water and comes across people of all stripes. First, “Barry” meets a sex worker, immediately getting her pregnant and witnessing her have the baby (and never has another movie jogged the memory of “Species II,” of all things, during this perversely icky sequence). Then, like the loopiest and most episodic road movie ever, he finds himself in a warehouse alongside a bunch of children and their psychotic kidnapper before taking him down in an intense chase and chainsaw battle, and then in an asylum where he and two other patients imagine their guns-blazing escape. But hey, “Barry” does do some good, like saving those children and saving a random man on the street from a heart attack. 

A visually audacious and often aurally assaultive endurance test, the film is not immediately easy to warm up to; in fact, it won’t be for most beings as a man makes an age-suitability warning before the production logos even come up. At some point, it stops being off-putting and kidnaps the viewer for a decisively cuckoo odyssey with Barry without ever looking back. It has a “Natural Born Killers”-influenced rear projection; a midway intermission with psychedelic intertitles of candy, popcorn, and hot dogs; and a throbbing electronic score and sound design by Haezer that the film wouldn’t be what it is without it. One thing is for sure about “Fried Barry” — it is always being its greasy, horny, oddball self, a different breed without a care in the world if you think it’s certifiably nuts. You do you, Barry. 

Grade: B

Shudder is releasing “Fried Barry” (99 min.) to stream on May 7, 2021.