Go West

Well here's a weird little nugget. For someone who lives in Utah, like myself, it's really unusual to see a movie that was written by locals, acted in by locals, and produced entirely locally... which is then actually enjoyable to watch.

Utah is a weird little microcosm of independent film making. We have schools with film programs, an active film commission, and an internationally recognized indie film festival (Sundance), to say nothing of the high-profile Hollywood blockbusters that come out to film in the southern bits of the state simply because you can't build sets that look that incredible. Utah has its own production studios, sound stages, skilled crews, and VFX houses, theoretically providing all the support you could ask for in creating a movie, and there really is no shortage of movies that have been made entirely in Utah.

Unfortunately they fall into exactly two categories; campy comedies that you have to be a member of the culturally dominant religion in order to find funny at all, and really, really bad movies. Perhaps there's a third category; some combination of the two.

Look, I'm not saying that I hate every movie that's been made in Utah that I've ever seen. Just the vast majority of them. They tend to have no budget, no concept of how to manage the budget they have, actors who trained for the stage in high school and wouldn't know subtlety if it hit them in the face, and writers/directors who got too wrapped up in the fantasy that they're Martin Scorsese crossed with Ridley Scott to realize that they've just accidentally re-written The Grapes of Wrath for the 400th time. There is so little local talent I can point to and unironically say they're actually super under-rated.

And then there's Studio C.

Or, well, JK Studios now. No shade on the current cast of Studio C, which is a sketch comedy show that's been running on BYU TV for well over a decade by this point, but the original cast, who left the show to create JK Studios, has a sort of alchemy of teamwork that is very difficult to match. Like, this is the group of people who brought us Scott Sterling.

See, you do know who I'm talking about.

As sketch comedians I've been watching JK Studios for a very long time now, and I've been very consistently entertained. Since spinning off from Studio C they've even produced a few short-form sketch-based TV shows like Freelancers, which is genuinely one of the funniest sitcoms I've had the pleasure of watching. So when they announced they were putting together a movie, I was hopeful it was going to be good, and when they announced they would have a limited theatrical run, I made plans to go see it.

So, Go West. How is it? Or, maybe first, what is it? Simply put it's a sketch comedy film based around traveling the Oregon Trail in the 1800s. If you imagine it as being a comedy dramatization of the classic computer game, um, Oregon Trail, you're already about half way to completely understanding the film. If you then imagine it as being in the same vein as, if not a straight homage to, the movies produced by Monty Python, then you've got a pretty much fully formed image of what Go West is without knowing hardly anything at all about it. And as far as elevator pitches go "a Monty Python style parody of the game Oregon Trail" is a darn compelling one.

And they execute on that pitch really well. The production design isn't like incredible quality or anything like that, but there's nothing that's distractingly bad. The costumes are all pretty well put together, the locations were well scouted and shot, and where the VFX weren't exactly MCU quality, well, it's a sketch comedy movie. They just played the bad VFX as part of the joke and it honestly worked pretty dang well. The casting was also excellent, though much like the Monty Python films they were inspired by, basically every named character was played by a member of the JK Studios cast. So the casting was probably also very easy to nail. 

Of course the success of anything like this is going to be in the writing, which I thought was excellent. The humor is very much in line with the style that has defined JK Studios and Studio C before it. I'll point you again to Monty Python for an understanding of the absurdist styling you should be expecting here, with the added observation that while you will find a similar irreverence, cultural commentary, and general randomness in Go West, unlike Monty Python there's nothing in here that I wouldn't feel comfortable showing to my 7-year-old. The most uncomfortable question he might ask is "what's dysentery", but explaining that there were a ton of horrible diseases in the 1800s is honestly a pretty tame and easy conversation to have.

So that's my review. I loved the movie. It's funny, it's topical, the jokes and characters are well crafted and significantly higher quality than, like, the vast majority of the Simpsons seasons. If you enjoy sketch comedy, Monty Python, or older Studio C stuff, you'll enjoy this. And if you want to support quality films made entirely in Utah, well, this is pretty much your only option to do so.