Best friends Chris (Rich Camp, who also wrote and directed the film) and Jackie (Frank Iac, who gets a co-writer credit) gotta find their friend, Barry. It’s a bit complicated because, well, Barry is dead. After a date gone wrong with his girlfriend, Barry’s mind was way too focused on the shitty emo music blaring during the sad car ride home and he accidentally hit a streetlight pole, which ejected him from his car and life. C’est la vie; except for Barry because he’s dead.
Chris and Jackie are in love with the dead, so Barry’s unfortunate accident works in their favor. They spend their days digging graves and nights hunting ghosts. The plot thickens when they attempt to reach Barry on the other side (they miss Barry a lot and want to hang out with him one last time), which coincidentally needs to happen in the haunted mansion he used to work at.
Gotta Find Barry may be the brain child of a sketch comedy group, What Boy, but nothing is funny about this film. It is meant to be funny, of course, but the story is buried too deep in manufactured punch lines and predictable, cliché comedy. What Boy is perhaps trying to find what works and what doesn’t, while we watch, but Gotta Find Barry‘s comic routine is so see-through it practically goes unnoticed. Like a ghost. (See, spoon-fed, somewhat on-topic jokes aren’t that funny.)
Chris may be our main character, while Jackie serves as the insensitive, vulgar comic relief best friend, but Chris just seems to serve as the guy who sets up Jackie’s schtick. And Jackie’s schtick becomes overbearing within the first twenty minutes, so the film gets exhausting way too early on. What Boy could turn out to be a great comedy troupe, but Gotta Find Barry shows us they have quite the road ahead of them when it comes to straightforward comedy feature films.
This film was submitted for review through our Submission for Review system. If you have a film you’d like us to see, and we aren’t already looking into it on our own, you too can utilize this service.
