There’s a whole lot of torture – and comedy – going on in the merrily demented medieval doings of Thursday’s “Quasi.”
A ridiculously silly send-up of Quasimodo, the doomed disabled hero of Victor Hugo’s immortal “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Quasi,” from the comic collaborative Broken Lizard, sees the hunchback as not only a romantic hero but the inventor of The Rack, France’s Number One torture device.
He’s also, it should be pointed out, hired as an assassin by both the King of France and the Pope. Each monarch asks him to kill their rival.
As what exactly is Broken Lizard, Kevin Heffernan – he’s Quasi’s best buddy and also directs – has the answer: “We’re a comedy group who started at Colgate University many years ago and have, obviously, made some movies. The name comes from – where Jay?”
Jay Chandrasekhar, who stars as the mad but merry King, recalled, “I wanted a name that would make people think of Monty Python. So I invented the name ‘Broken Lizard’ so that it would be this sort of reptilian continuity. We’re a five-man group,” he added. “So were the Pythons. We hoped we’d at least be mentioned in the same conversation some day.”
Their first film “Super Troopers” is a venerated cult hit and spawned a 2018 sequel.
“Our approach was always to make movies about groups of friends that people would want to hang out with,” said Steve Lemme, who is the well-meaning but often troubled Quasi. “If you watch all our movies, you’ll notice we’re never mean-spirited. And the only time we mess with anybody is if they mess with us.
“That’s what people connected with when ‘Super Troopers’ came out on video back in 2002 and 2003. It was the equivalent of a viral video! People would put it on at parties and hang out with their friends and watch it. These DVDs got shared and passed around quite a bit. So I think that we have a nice, positive style of comedy which we’ve needed for, well, for forever.”
“We also moisturize a lot too,” Heffernan added.
When you have frequent torture scenes, including male genitalia nailed to a table, how gross is too gross?
“I don’t know,” Heffernan allowed. “We kind of moved the line on this on how far to go with a scene…
“But it depends on the world too. This world gave us license to go further than, say, the reality-based world of ‘Super Troopers.’”