Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls Is Almost Too Bad to Cringe At
Even if you laugh at the kind of overwritten fantasy language that lends Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls its title, I still don’t think you’ll like the movie. Based around Andrew Bowser’s character from a bevy of viral videos, Onyx is 110 Kickstarted minutes of unfunny dithering, giving the writer/director another showcase for his muttery, nasal diatribes. His grown goth nerd combines ‘80s references and profanity at random, served with a sweaty, m’lady delivery (Onyx would probably refer to it as being like the Micro Machines guy) as outdated as the fedora-donned memes from which he takes his aesthetic. Shoving this middle school nightmare of a character into a half-hearted demon-summoning plot, Onyx aims for low-fi absurdity, like a Hot Topic Napoleon Dynamite or talentless Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. It’s awful. To cringe at this movie’s dearth of comedy is a kindness, one that might actually be too good for its off-putting central performance.
And that’s really all there is to the movie. You’d have to find it amusing to enjoy the film, because if you don’t like Onyx saying a joke—then saying it again with additional volume and speed, like a kid in the back of class who just got the endorphin rush of a big laugh—you’ve got nothing else to hold onto. When Onyx isn’t running through his lines, Bowser loses interest in his own film, directing it like he’s killing time.
But there’s something gross about his anxious, compensating yammering, maybe because—no matter the shoehorned backstory—it always feels like the character’s joke is punching down, mocking furries, Satanists and other members of fringe subcultures (or, like one of his YouTube videos, homeless people) for an easy, bullying laugh. You can try to reclaim the word all you like, but when your sketches do numbers because of a “Weird [X] Guy” titling convention, you’re even straying from the equally exhausting trend that turned “geek” and “gamer” into capital-building buzzwords. Video games, comic books, horror movies and all the TV shows you loved as a kid are the dominant culture, folks. You can drop the persecution complex at any time.
All the people Onyx meets when he wins a contest, giving him a Satanic golden ticket out of his burger-flipping real life, are certainly self-assured. The dull group of stilted, single-joke characters are there to serve Bartok the Great (Jeffrey Combs), ready to help summon a demon. Naturally, this isn’t why they’re actually there, and Onyx has to toughen up for once to help out his new friends and figure out what’s going on. But the plot is too dull to reach the over-the-top, Saturday Morning Cartoon silliness powering its horror-comedy influences, and its styling feels less like a satirical riff on other “gather a group at a spooky mansion” movies and more like a bunch of people cosplaying their Dungeons & Dragons actual-play characters.