Fubar II: They’re Back, and Screwier than Ever

Terry and Dean are back. After a five-year hiatus, the Canadian duo (David Lawrence and Paul Spence) return in the new film Fubar II: Balls to the Wall, still luckless, head-banging, and burned out. Complete chaos ensues as the pair falls in love, celebrates Christmas with their families, and joins a friend, Tron, in Northern Alberta’s oil fields to build pipelines and make extra cash (and scam workman’s comp).

Originally based on Lawrence and Spence’s comedy routine about a couple of simpleton, beer-guzzling Western Canadian head-bangers, the first Fubar (an acronym for Fucked Up Beyond All/Any Recognition/Repair/Reason) film, a mockumentary released in 2002, was an immediate cult favorite—think This Is Spinal Tap, Trailer Park Boys, and the similarly phrase-coining Wayne’s World. Made with a considerably larger budget, and sparing fewer innocent bystanders, its follow-up is perhaps even more excessive and totally screwy.

Within the first seven minutes of the film, a party celebrating Dean beating testicular cancer—”Yay to my boy and his ball!” his mother cheers—quickly turns into an “eviction party” fueled by a trunkload of beer, LSD, Black Sabbath, chainsaws, and baseball bats. “There’s a lot of energy on set, and it’s really conducive to improv,” director Mike Dowse (It’s All Gone Pete Tong, Take Me Home Tonight) notes. “But we have to carefully plan it out to make sure the madness is controlled, because we’re burning shit up!”

While moments of calm are rare, Terry and Dean’s spacey naiveté is charming as often as it is self-sabotaging. As Lawrence, whose “Terry” was born from a Halloween costume when he was 16, points out, “They’re just bangers. Simple, simple labor guys who all they really want is for their truck to run and a six-pack of beer.”

Despite the pair’s seemingly endless and absurd run of near escapes—a suicide pact, for one—their enduring friendship is at the movie’s core. From passed out mistakes made in the “trucker room” Jacuzzi at a fantasy hotel, to “operating” machinery in an oil field, Terry and Dean, somehow, get by. “You end up caring about guys these guys even if you thought you hated them. The comedy is what people really respond to, and the film has heart,” Lawrence adds. “It touches people in a weird way that they don’t expect.”

FUBAR II: BALLS TO THE WALL IS OUT ON DVD TODAY.