Title – The Fanatic (2019)

Director – Fred Durst (The Longshots)

Cast – John Travolta, Devon Sawa, Ana Golja, Jacob Grodnik

Plot – Mentally unstable diehard movie fan and celebratory fanatic Moose (Travlota) starts to take things too far in his fandom when he learns about where his favourite actor Hunter Dunbar (Sawa) lives.

“I can’t talk too long. I gotta poo”

Review by Eddie on 03/04/2020

I think we would all agree that we live in a pretty wild world.

A world in which seemingly anything can happen, at any time in many bizarre and unpredictable ways.

This world we live in just so happens to have allowed the lead singer of Limp Bizkit to direct a film he wrote himself, with the one time Hollywood heavy hitting star of Grease and Saturday Night Fever to become a real thing.

This thing is known as The Fanatic, a film that quickly became the biggest stinker yet of John Travolta’s once solid career and a film that featured heavily in the recent Razzie awards; oh it’s also the film with one of the worst on screen haircuts you’re ever likely to see and a film that opens with Travolta uttering the sentence “I can’t talk too long. I gotta poo”.

Centred around Travolta’s mentally disabled Moose, a grown man who wanders around the Hollywood strip dressed as a British police officer, while at all times obsessing about the Hollywood actors he believes he can be friends with, The Fanatic is a film not unlike granddaddy of unintentional bad films The Room, in that its director clearly thinks he is making some big statements, while also allowing his lead performance to go completely off the rails with no reigning in.

To say it’s embarrassing watching Travolta mumble and nervously waltz his way through this film would be a massive understatement but it’s also one of those performances that you can’t turn away from as you don’t want to miss whatever odd scene or moment is coming up next, elements that come thick and fast as Moose’s journey takes him down a continuously slippery slope too a dark and depraved endgame.

Travolta’s deranged and insanely infused performance, that honestly beggars belief, is the perfect reason why Fred Durst’s grim and glum film is the type of genuinely bad offering that you should still watch, as it offers us a rare chance to see talent wasted, dreams of grandeur shattered and careers reaching new lows in ways in which you never thought you’d see.

Final Say –

That The Fanatic was ever made is odd enough, that it stars a now slumming it one-time A-lister and is directed by a rap/rock heavyweight makes it even odder and ensures its place in the cult movie circuit for the year’s yet to come. Now quick, go find a copy, I gotta poo.

1 poppycock out of 5