Many other reviews have covered the excellence of the stoned/junked-out humour and the overall kind of lackadaisical mood of entropy: everything going to a chaotic, baroque hell.
What I really loved in this little movie was the attention to detail. The costumes and hair/makeup for instance are brilliant. Steven Eric McIntyre couldn't look greasier, and his cold gray eyes burn holes out of his pale grizzled face. He struts into his first scene wearing clapped out flares and some seriously flash rattlesnake cowboy boots, reminding me of legendary close-up shots of gunfighters' boots as they stride into the road for a battle. Bug Is Here and things are going to proceed downhill at a steady clip. Later, you see big black and silver rings and a huge silver belt buckle of galloping horses, that fit right in with Bug's self-image of a bad-arse cowboy pining for his horse, Jezebel. It's fitting that he dies in the saddle, no? Pretty boy Billy has the perfect Euro-boy new wave-ish uniform of stripy tight t-shirts and pegged black jeans, along with big 60-ish sideburns and a flop of wedge-cut hair that was the hipster haircut of the early 80s.
Then there's some of the best use of soundtrack music I've heard in a while. The director has a similar gift for setting moods with music as does Scorcese and his legendary oeuvre that uses the Rolling Stones in pitch-perfect moments. This being a Canadian movie, it makes perfect sense to string the music of April Wine, along with screen shots of their vinyl albums and cassettes, throughout the movie. This band, along with CCR, 3 Dog Night and the kind of obscure (if you're not a Canadian who was in his 20s during the late 70s) Montreal recording artist, Pagliaro--set a very specific mood: that of balls to the wall lose your head stoner rock. I was a total new wave/mod/ska/punk snob in my early 1980s jr high and high school years, but I still have fond memories of secretly blasting stoner rock out of my headphones or car stereo and leaning back and just time traveling. This kind of epic release is what all of the characters in this film are searching for.
Lastly, there are the strange and wondrous uses of visual motifs: specifically, pink and horses. The morphine pills are bright pink as they are crushed in the ice cream scooper, then dissolved into a brilliant pink solution that courses through the veins of Bug, Billy and Dick. Billy eats a pink fluff of cotton candy, and the ice cream Bug pulls out of the freezer as they are cooking pink morphine in Dick's apartment, is pink strawberry ice cream. Junkies crave sugar, and in this movie, it's pink sugar that is their cracked ambrosia. When we first see Bug and Dick cooking up and getting high, there's a junky dream of thick pink slop reminiscent of the "cook" dripping over the edge of a cardboard box. (Incidentally, that box has an image of a big red barn that perfectly syncs with the big red barn that contains the horses that Bug finds at the end of the movie.) Then there's the mother of all pink paint bombs that so hilariously covers Bug and Dick, making Bug look like, in Dick's words, "a f*#king pink Chuck Norris".
And then there's the horses. First, we see them on Bug's belt buckle, and then he has a junky vision of a horse standing over him that he calls "Jezebel". (A childhood memory of a long lost pet? A sly reference to the junky slang word for heroin--"horse"?) Bug fancies himself to be a kind of twisted cowboy, and he meets his storied end covered with pink paint on the back of a beloved horse, on his way to South America. I just love that kind of attention to detail--it's what makes me want to watch this film over and over. And since "High Life" is on heavy rotation on Showtime, that's exactly what I've been doing, with the speakers turned up to 11.
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