The 2010 Insane Clown Posse Western Big Money Rustlas is no Masterpiece But I Had Fun!
Over the course of my many years trying to articulate the fundamental dignity of the misunderstood and maligned Juggalo and the overlooked cultural and creative worth of Insane Clown Posse, I’ve argued that even when Insane Clown Posse’s music or movies or projects aren’t necessarily “good” or even particularly entertaining, they’re nevertheless notable for being weird and interesting.
I would have a hard time describing the duo’s 2010 Western Big Money Rustlas as “good” and though I enjoyed my share of chuckles, it would be a stretch to describe the movie as entertaining. But the deadpan ridiculousness of men in clown make up gallivanting about the old west in one of the film world’s only hip-hop-inspired, post-modern, gleefully meta-textual westerns is so weird and so interesting that it nearly justifies the whole bizarre enterprise.
Violent J, who also came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay, stars as Big Baby Chips, an evil gambler who rules the small town of Mud Bug with an iron fist with the help of his two dim-witted henchmen, Raw Stank (Jamie Madrox of Twiztid) and Dusty Poot (Monoxide Child, also of Twiztid). I know what you’re probably thinking: doesn’t it make you feel a little melancholy to see Violent J and Twiztid yucking it up onscreen together in light of the painful split between Juggalo Nation between ICP’s Psychopathic Records and Twitztid’s Majik Ninja Entertainment? Yes, yes it kind of does. In that respect, this is a throwback to a more innocent era in the Juggalo world, before a low-key civil war called the whole concept of Juggalo unity into question at the worst possible time.
Shaggy 2 Dope costars as the film’s hero, Sugar Wolf, a fearsome gunslinger whose quick draw is matched only by his seemingly supernatural ability to slap people in ways that defy gravity, physics and reality. Sugar Wolf returns to the terrified town of Mud Bug to avenge the death of his father Grizzly Wolf (Ron Jeremy, unfortunately) and his brothers.
Big Money Rustlas is somehow even sillier than you would imagine a film with its premise and cast might be. If you were to give a ten year old with a very vivid imagination and a deep love of crude scatology money to make a western comedy, it’d probably feel a whole lot like Big Money Rustlas, which at its best recalls the scrappy, irreverent homemade silliness of Cannibal: The Musical. In a typical gag, before Sugar Wolf arrives at Mud Bug, he meets some Native Americans, led by Psychopathic Recording artist Anybody Killa (whose persona, appropriately enough, is rooted in Native American mythology), who ask him to sign their hatchets.
Hatchets figure very prominently in Insane Clown Posse mythology, as some of y’all know, so while walking away, Sugar Wolf admonishes them not to sell the signed hatchets on Ebay. That’s only one of a series of gags that violate the fourth wall Blazing Saddles/Bugs Bunny style.
In the film’s most ridiculous, ridiculously extended meta gag, Sugar Wolf has a hankering for chili, so he dispatches Sheriff Fred Freckles, a kooky old prospector type played by Eric Geller, to travel to New York to get his favorite chili. Fred first travels in the wrong direction and ends up in Mexico. Then he corrects himself and heads north, where he meets Tom Sizemore sunning himself (that’s Tom Sizemore playing troubled character actor Tom Sizemore, not character actor Tom Sizemore playing a role) and, despite being a fictional character from a different time period and century, professes to be a big fan and asks for an autograph.
Possibly out of some drug-fueled rage, Sizemore refuses to sign autographs but when this silly comic relief sheriff from the 19th century professes to love lesser known Sizemore movies like the direct-to-video 1992 Sharon Stone vehicle Where Sleeping Dogs Lie and Harley Davidson & The Marlboro Man he changes his tune and starts talking about his acting method.
This gag is less funny ha-ha than funny strange but the bit keeps going and going and going until what I like to call the Simpsons Rake effect sets in, and it goes from being unfunny, then funny, then brutally unfunny, and then funny all over again.
The movie’s plot finds Big Baby Chips trying to keep Sugar Wolf from imposing order and the rule of law in his hometown by dispatching a series of cartoonish assassins to kill him, including a figure known only as “The Foot”, who earned his nickname by virtue of his horrifically swollen, puss-laden foot. The Foot uses what appears to be some manner of steam-punk wheelchair and yells things like, “I’m the Foot, bitch.”
The Foot is an understated figure of refreshing subtlety compared to another would-be Sugar Wolf killer, a zombie-looking dude known as The Ghost (Boondox, one of a number of former Psychopathic Recording artists who show up in small but juicy roles) who shoots lasers out of his eyes. Why is he shooting lasers if he’s in a western? The fuck if I know. Then again Big Money Rustlas isn’t one of those movies where things “make sense.” It assumes, not without reason, that if you’re watching an Insane Clown Posse western you’re just going to accept whatever clownish insanity appears onscreen. You’re not just going to accept it: you’re going to embrace it.
I consequently enjoyed Big Money Rustlas, within reason, not because it’s “good” or anything, but rather because I have so much affection for the world if depicts and its various players.
Do I enjoy watching Violent J onscreen because he’s such a masterful actor? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. Not since the heyday of Phillip Seymour Hoffman has an actor so powerfully expressed the contradictions, complexities and intermittent joy of being human. Violent J doesn’t just “act” here. That doesn’t do justice to the majesty of his performance as Big Baby Chips. No, it would be more accurate to say that in Big Money Rustlas, J exposes troubling and important truths about ourselves we prefer not to know.
Violent J was so powerful, and perhaps more importantly, authentic as Big Baby Chips in Big Money Rustlas that impressed Broadway producers offered him the lead role of Willy Loman in a revival of Death of a Salesman but he would only accept if he could do it in full clown make-up. That proved to be a deal-breaker.
Nah, none of that is true. Unlike Shaggy 2 Dope, who gets at least a B+ for effort in at least attempting to play an old west gunslinger, Violent J just kind of does his Violent J shtick, yelling loudly and hollering at people to give him his money. I enjoyed his performance because I enjoy Violent J, whether he’s being transcendently silly delivering a speech at the March on Washington or devouring scenery in an enjoyably shitty western romp.
That craziness extends to a mind-bending/nonsensical climax where we discover that Big Baby Chips is actually Sugar Wolf’s father. It seems that Grizzly Wolf faked his death so he could shuck off his onerous responsibilities and reinvent himself as a face-painted figure of pure greed. Ron Jeremy comes back to play Grizzly Wolf/Big Baby Chips after he’s gunned down by his son.
Big Baby Chips is revealed to be nothing more than a persona of Grizzly Wolf yet that doesn’t keep him from popping up at the very end (once again played by Violent J) to shout “Wicked clowns will never die!” and instigate a movie-ending shootout where all hell joyously breaks loose.
This confused the living fuck out of me, but to paraphrase A Serious Man, I think it’s best to just embrace the mystery.
I got a whole lot more out of Big Money Rustlas the second time around than I did initially. All I needed to do was immerse myself in the world of Insane Clown Posse, become a full-on Juggalo, write multiple books about Insane Clown Posse, become unemployable in multiple fields, lose many of my friends and professional colleagues and stumble into a never-ending professional free-fall in order to properly enjoy this dumb movie the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
Was it worth it? I’ll leave the answer up to you, but yeah, it probably was.
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