No complaints, really. Like the Strangers With Candy movie, which sadly disappeared from party discussion about three days after release, the ATHF feature is as good as…..a good episode of the show. Not a great episode; a good episode. Maybe I’m being a little harsh. Maybe it’s just a little better than that. I was never scared of its failure. There was really no logical way that it would all-out suck. The only aspect that scared me was the idea of being in a theater full of Aqua Teen Hunger Force fanatics.ÂÂ
This Slate review is as ignorant as the writer professes the subject to be. The film stands on its own without a front-to-back knowledge of the show (though it might help). I’ve missed big chunks of the past two seasons. Before that, I kept up, and even unsuccessfully auditioned for a peripheral character V.O. via phone. That was August of 2003. Before that (I think), I interviewed the creators for Chunklet Magazine. In February of 2005, during a particularly fucked-up period of my life, I blew town and went to Atlanta as a guest at the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Appreciation Party. The guy that voices Master Shake looks exactly like you’d expect, though series DVD owners/renters already know this. My point is, as a lapsed fan that almost entered an outer fold of sorts, I used to know the show. Through no fault of its creators or content, it appears to have attracted a Burning Man/Complete Dumbass/Stoner audience (what percentage of the full audience this accounts for, I don’t know), though it’s still smarter than (and a totally different animal from) the vastly-improved South Park. It takes quite a wit and gift for dialogue construction to write ATHF. Belly laughs? A couple. I laughed especially hearty at the “Will you answer that fucking phone?!?!â€Â line. Look for it when you go see the film. That brings me to another thought. It was a little jarring, then really funny, to hear the characters unleash a torrent of fucks, fuck-you’s, and fucking’s. And in a rare instance of pop-cultural name-dropping (a crutch that the show has always brilliantly managed to avoid), director Bob Clark gets a shout-out (eerily, he died in a car accident on April 4th). So yes, I liked it. ÂÂ
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