Why Stavros Halkias is the best part of Let’s Start a Cult

Photo: Stavros Halkias via YouTube

Let’s start a cult grainy camera footage opens showing interviews with members of the suicide cult about why they believe they are “ready to cross the line.” One by one, they tell their off-camera leader, William (Wes Haney), about the important lessons they’ve learned from him in preparation for their big day. “This tree we are on is burning and is telling us to get down,” one of them says stoically. “Deep in my heart I know that we can do much more,” says another. Cut to Chip, played by a comedian Stavros HalkiasBaltimore accent in full effect: “Thanks to your teachings, I convinced a Chinese lady suffering from dementia that I was her son,” he says. “I got about $13,000 out of her before she realized I couldn’t actually speak Mandarin; I was just creating sounds. At the bottom of the screen, the recording marks the duration of the interview until May 24, 2000.

If this were a period piece, Chip would have impersonated the lady in an unrealistic way instead of just saying he created the “sounds,” but his trashy irreverence is nonetheless a throwback to period comedy. Let’s start a cult shares DNA with the 2004 models Dodgeball through a crazy plot that connects a group of sluts and 2004 Napoleon’s dynamite in the way his comedy flows freely from the quirks of his underdog characters. There’s even a comedic sex scene straight out of 2000 Road trip or 1999 American cake. It’s profoundly stupid, much like the character-driven comedies that were popular before Judd Apatow’s humanistic stories influenced almost every comedy film that got greenlit, before the industry’s turning point when even those stopped being made.

Directed by Ben Kitnick, who co-wrote the film with Halkias and Haney Let’s start a cult is shaggy by design: irritated by his terrible behavior, Chip’s cult performs their poison ritual without him, which sets off a series of events during which a defeated Chip returns to his parents’ house, learns on the news that William is still alive and on the run from the law, tracks and blackmails him into helping him start a new cult. Their subsequent journey to recruit new members, which takes up most of the film, is little more than an excuse to introduce the gang of endearing oddballs and place them in various locations where they can exchange loose, improvised dialogue and play wild jokes.

This brings us to the apartment of Tyler (Eric Rahill), a rejected candidate for military service whom William rightly surmises is a vulnerable target who needs to be brought into the fold; Chip and Tyler play Nintendo 64 while Tyler’s non-fiancée, played by Zuri Salahuddin (“You can’t call someone your fiancée if they say no!”), has loud, animalistic sex with a cameo Joe Pera in the next room. This way we get a slow-motion montage that resembles a movie scene at the gas station Zoolander where Chip, William, Tyler and new cult recruit Diane (Katy Fullan) paint a car with house paint; ends with Chip capriciously throwing a bucket of paint into William’s eye and nearly blinding him. How otherwise should they hide their car from the police other than by accidentally and conspicuously repainting it blue?

At the center of it all is Halkias as Chip, extracting all the value from every line, imbuing it with the perfect mix of proud man-child exasperation and bruised ego. In one scene, he tries to repeat an obvious lie he told his parents to explain why he disappeared from their lives to join a cult: “For the last time, Mom, I trained in Tokyo to become a karate master, but the day before the big championships, my sensei betrayed me and stole my beautiful girlfriend Akiko. I was too broken to fight and that’s why I lost! Doesn’t anyone fucking listen to me in this house?! In another scene, he goes berserk while talking about the outcome of a wrestling match 19 years earlier and laments, “God, it was rigged!”

You don’t have to squint too hard when watching Halkias’ performance to see its echoes Danny McBridewhose work is an obvious point of reference in Chip’s construction. Like Fred Simmons The Foot Fist WayChip’s ill-advised boasts act as subtle commentary on the absurdities of masculinity, and none of his jabs at charisma land enough to make you lose sight of the fact that the joke is on him. (The same can’t be said for Shane Gillis’ Netflix comedy series Tireswhich also featured Halkias this year.) But there’s also a pathos to the character that makes his cloying arrangement more bearable. Sometimes he’s just a youthful buffoon, but just as often he acts out out of insecurity, an inability to cope with his emotions, or a desperate desire to connect. That’s why the film’s ending, in which Chip finds a loving home among his iconic recruits-turned-friends, is heartfelt. Even though you wouldn’t want to date him, it’s nice to see him winning.

In his 2018 Master classApatow discussed the value of writing comedy as drama, Then working backwards, introducing jokes. “It really doesn’t help to think of these stories as comedies,” he said. “The problem with a lot of comedies is that they serve primarily comedic purposes and don’t really have a reason to exist.” His films were consistently criticized for being too long and ambitious. Let’s start a cult meanwhile, it takes the opposite approach: starting with the comics and then working backwards with the drama. It has no reason to exist unless it’s a tool for jokes, and that’s all the better.