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Goo Goo G'Joob - Kevin Smith tackles a walrus in 'TUSK'

Posted Thursday, July 18, 2013 at 12:43 PM Central
Last updated Friday, July 26, 2013 at 12:25 PM Central

by John Couture

Is Michael Parks the walrus?

I admit it. I'm slipping. I'm getting old. Fatherhood has wrecked my mental agility along with my normal sleeping patterns. Normal, ha! It's also taking a toll on my lifetime membership to the Kevin Smith fan club.

Four years ago, I made the analogy to feeling like Brodie in Mallrats finding out that Stan Lee was signing at his mall when I found out about Hit Somebody 24 hours after the news leaked. Now, if only I could be so lucky.

There was a time where I used to be so in touch with Kevin Smith's movements and upcoming projects that it was borderline stalkerish, but having a kid does strange things to your free time. You combine that with Kevin's attempt to have the most prolific "retirement" ever and you can see just how hard it is to stay up on all things View Askew, er SMod.

This news is so far out of left field that I'm not even sure if it comes from this continent. Kevin Smith has finished the script to a new horror film called TUSK. The film, which he has compared to the old Hammer Horror films, centers on an older man who is looking for a lodger with the promise of free rent, with only one catch. The lodger has to don a walrus suit for multiple hours each day and while in the suit, he can't speak or otherwise do anything that a walrus wouldn't do.

If you're left scratching your head, I'm sure you're not the only one. The story originates from this posting on the website Gumtree.com, which is a British knockoff of Craigslist. As Kevin is wont to do, he used this posting as a jumping off point for a recent SModcast episode entitled "The Walrus and the Carpenter"" that he records with his long-time producing partner Scott Mosier.

In true SModcast fashion, the pair took the story to its inevitable and often hilarious far-flung conclusions about the older man being a serial killer and the poor young lodger never being seen again by his mates. Somewhere along the way in the podcast, the idea of actually making this into a film started to sprout with 10{Kevin comparing it at times to The Human Centipede and The Purge.

Towards the end of the podcast, he solicited his Twitter followers to let him know if they were in favor of the film by tweeting a #WalrusYes or against it with a #WalrusNo. It seems that the response was overwhelmingly positive.

The Instagram picture is a screen shot from Kevin's computer showing the title page to the TUSK screenplay and walrus research sites in the background. Over the last few weeks, he's been tweeting out little update nuggets that I completely missed until the last one.

And that folks is what you call the true power of the Internet. A thought blossoms and with a few thousand tweets of support, a film is born.

I know that some might attack Kevin Smith for supposedly going back on his word that he was retired as a director, but those people just need to go back and actually comprehend what Kevin said. He said that he didn't think there were any more stories that he had to tell so he wasn't going to simply get a paycheck.

Obviously, Clerks III and TUSK were new stories that came to him and we should be happy that Kevin is going back to the directing well. He has already said Michael Parks will play the role of the carpenter and after seeing the depths he took Abin Cooper in Red State, I shudder to think what he will do with a walrus-obsessed serial killer.

Details are scarce right now as you would imagine, but I figure he would film this after Clerks III sometime next year. Of course, details could also be scarce because this is all part of some elaborate hoax that Kevin Smith is pulling to either show the absurdity of the Internet in fueling silly ideas or to get the last laugh at those self-righteous movie blogger.

While it would be absolutely hilarious if this were indeed a hoax, I tend to believe that Kevin is one of the most genuine dudes in Hollywood. I believe in TUSK, do you?

#WalrusYes