Review: “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie” (2022)

A celebration of low-culture ephemera that reminds you of everything you love — and loathe — about the 2000s

By: Toxicka Shock

Toxickashock@gmail.com

On Twitter: @Toxickashock

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Something like “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie” is an interesting little sliver of trash culture ephemera for two reasons.

First of all, it’s a movie that instantly reminds you of your own wayward adolescent and teenage years. Even if you weren’t hyper obsessed with “Jackass” or “The Tom Green Show” like the stars of Addison Binek’s home movie compilation, it still calls to mind all of the incredibly dumb and dangerous shit you did in your youth in vulgar displays of mock machismo. Watching high school weirdos during the George W. Bush years smash acoustic guitars against fences for no discernible reason whatsoever and goading each other into stepping on mousetraps or stapling sheets of paper to the forearms feels a little too close to my own experiences — the feelings evoked there are one part nostalgia, one part unalloyed horror.

The other thing that makes “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie” such an intriguing little oddity is its remarkable atemporality. The entire hour-long production feels like it was filmed in a cultural vacuum — even though it covers more than a decade of home movies, the aesthetics and ambiance feels almost impossibly consistent. There are parts of this movie that feel like they could have just as easily been filmed in 1998 or 2008, and the only giveaway is “The Dark Knight” poster hanging on the wall.

Depending on your perspective, that’s either a ringing endorsement of the timelessness of juvenile idiocy or the greatest indictment against suburban homogeneity imaginable.

There is no plot to speak of in “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie.” Rather, it’s a rather skillfully edited hodgepodge of crass and crude stunts that starts off with high school sophomores pouring milk on each other and laughing like hyenas and culminates with those same “CKY” wannabes as adults — complete with real jobs and families of their own — still engaging in video-recorded tomfoolery.

It's like "Bum FIGHTS," Only They Have homes and stuff.

The lesson there, I suppose, is that some individuals never really grow out of their “Johnny Knoxville phase.” The same kids who bash each other over the heads with giant hand-shaped pieces of furniture and and plow headfirst through plastic garbage cans like sentient bowling balls in AC/DC and Tenacious D T-shirts, inevitably, grow up to become art school graduates who make esoteric mini-movies about people eating bananas in Halloween masks and smashing microwaves — that are plugged in and turned on — with baseball bats.

Of course, there’s a fair amount of gross-out quasi-body horror involved. There’s close-up scenes of people stepping on dog shit, licking grapes and feeding them to unknowing victims and an especially icky vignette in which a teenager injects water into his nostrils with a turkey baster. Naturally, this culminated with a lot of Kleenex getting covered in snot, sputum and bloody nasal passage residue. 

John Waters would be proud. Or terrified. One or the other, really.

There’s nothing utterly revolting or outrageous in “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie,” though, and at times, the film almost takes on an avant-garde air. One minute the cast are launching quarters at each other’s knuckles (a particularly vicious schoolyard pastime, for those of you unaware of North American customs) and in the next, there’s a long, lingering shot of random football players and cheerleaders casually stepping over a piece of metal left at the front entrance of school. 

It’s almost Bunuelian, in a way. Not that the kids who made the clip had any idea who Bunuel was at the time, assuredly.

Periodically the film hits you with a scene so reminiscent of your own upbringing, you can’t help but get a little sentimental. There’s one particular scene where some kids put on hockey gloves and engaging in a basement boxing bout. Of course, you don’t pay attention to any of the fisticuffs, because you’re too awestruck by the CRT computer setup in the background … and mesmerized by the “Cat in the Hat” poster, which is hanging on the wall because — well, reasons.

It’s a movie that largely works better as a reflection of pop culture than a film itself. There are scenes where 20-somethings lumber around in Divine T-shirts while pretending to be Tony Hawk and clips where a disembodied narrator chases a pug around a living room, asking it if it enjoys cans of green beans or wants to watch a VHS copy of “Terminator 2.” It’s a style of absurdist comedy that’s been displaced due to a litany of social factors — show this stuff to a Gen Z kid and they’ll be bewildered by the content, obviously unaware of its loving homages to the oeuvre of Steve-O and Bam Margera.

Who needs an xbox or a playstation when you've got staplers?

There are moments that almost seem inspired, such as the “Obviously Filming People” vignettes where — well, take a guess. Then we’re bombarded by split second jokes about ducks being asked to sign release forms and scenes where college-aged kids casually snack on dog food. 

It shouldn’t make you feel pangs of innocence and naive optimism, however displaced. But I’ll be damned if “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie” doesn’t do exactly that … intentionally or unintentionally.

Nobody’s going to mistake “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie” as an Oscar-winner. Indeed, the audience for something like this has to be incredibly narrow — unless there’s more connoisseurs of mid-2000s social basse culture out there than I assume, this kind of product is about as niche as it gets.

There’s no guarantee that you’ll enjoy the film as a standalone “comedy” or even a folk cinema tribute. But one thing’s for sure — love it or hate it, “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie” isn’t boring.

And like any ennui-averse teenager unaware that the Great Recession is right around the corner, who among us can resist a few vignettes about freshmen jumping off their houses in laundry baskets and trying to mow each other down with shopping carts?

Regardless of the era, youthful stupidity is guaranteed. You might lament the fact that “Magnum Opus: The .MOVie” serves as something of a testament to that type of destructive and quasi-anti-social behavior. But I’m just happy it was preserved for future generations to observe the undeniable truth of that immortal aphorism — the more things change, the more they really do stay the same.

XOXO, Toxicka