Directed by Nick Verdi
Written by Nick Verdi, B.R. Yeager
Starring Jimmy Laine, Ethan Hansen, Franklin Statz
Running time 1 hour, 26 minutes

by “Doc” Hunter Bush, MJ Podcast Czar

It’s finally turning cold in Philadelphia after a unseasonably late turn from the warm weather. And oddly I find my mind returning to a flick I caught a few months back at this year’s Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival. Cockazoid is a very uncomfortable film, as emotionally cold as the Massachusetts landscape it takes place in, but I find it exceedingly fascinating. It’s been sitting in the back of my mind since the screening ended, a sinister hum undermining my every quiet moment.

Cockazoid is the brainchild of director/co-writer Nick Verdi (co-written with author B.R. Yeager) and it’s …unsettling to say the least. Andrew (Jimmy Laine) is a loner. A disaffected young man who, it is obvious from the film’s opening moments, has become untethered from reality. He travels back to his hometown using a family tragedy as an excuse but his ultimate goal is to kill all the white men (not unlike himself) in Massachusetts. While he doesn’t even come close to achieving his goal, he comes a lot closer than most people ever would.

Now, I’m going to say something that might sound really odd: This movie is very funny. It’s super dark in tone, and filled with an almost continual sense of dread. The kills in the movie are brutal and the kind of low-budget explicit where the unrealism of them makes them more horrific - watching Andrew attempt to dismember a victim’s corpse in the woods with just a pocket knife and some random stick he found on the ground is kind of nauseating but it’s also hilarious in its futility. It’s why butchers don’t cut meat with a Swiss Army knife. It’s only because this is a film; because you can see that the torso he’s mutilating is fake, that it’s funny at all.

There’s a kind of sick humor in Andrew himself. He’s so cartoonishly incompetent and socially impotent that to even compare him to any type of specific mindset feels like an insult. He’s a cautionary tale. What sadly occasionally does really happen when extreme, deep-seeded mental illness and the kind of self-aggrandizing keyboard warrior mindset get too high on their own supply and think their fantasies of being some kind of philosophical warrior for a higher truth are in any way connected to reality. It’s the kind of thinking we see whenever any mass shooter or aspirant serial killer’s manifesto comes to light.

That’s also what I found most interesting in Cockazoid. Andrew’s inner monologues contain just glimpses into his beliefs, if you can even consider them actual, capital-B “Beliefs.” These brief bits of his headspace seem as unrelated to each other as they are to reality. One moment he’s rattling off statistics: how many white men live in Massachusetts, how much square footage the state has available for him to bury his army of victims, etc., and in the next moment he’s fantasizing about retiring to the afterlife to live in a mansion with a roof shingled in their teeth. This seemingly constant flux of his core motivation makes Andrew both more frightening and more pathetic in equal measure. Does he just want to kill for the sake of killing or is he hiding behind the scapegoat of a nebulous “greater purpose”.

I’m trying not to overuse the word “fascinating.” Just because it’s bad writing, not because I’m worried what you’ll think of my being fascinated by Cockazoid. I think the point of Cockazoid is to be fascinated by it. And disgusted, in equal measure.

The filmmaking is incredibly well done. Everything, everywhere feels cold. There’s hardly a moment where the tension or discomfort is allowed to ease up. The neighborhoods, woods, and fields of Massachusetts feel labyrinthine and claustrophobic. There are occasional peeks into Andrew’s early life that are shown as degraded and warped VHS home videos in his mind’s eye, a format that is inherently off-putting no matter what’s shown, but with the feeling of a horrific impending revelation looming, it becomes nail-biting.

Jimmy Laine’s performance as Andrew is just as incredible. There’s something to be said for a performance that isn’t afraid to be ugly that’s absolutely commendable when it fits the subject matter this well. As a character, Andrew has hyped himself up to the point that he almost has to kill someone or else admit that maybe the problem isn’t the entire world, maybe it’s just him. But once he’s done it, he has to justify it, which leads him back to the same place, mentally. And around and around it goes. As a performer, Laine’s large eyes bulge and shift, his motions are ungainly and awkward, the internal struggle he is having is clearly depicted at all times.

Not that I see myself as any great tastemaker, but I hope this article can help generate a little buzz about this film. It really should be seen. I reached out to director Nick Verdi, and as of yet he has gotten no real response about getting Cockazoid any proper distribution, which is honestly a disappointment. It’s not a film for everyone, nor is it one I could see myself rewatching every year - it’s much too unpleasant for that - but it’s still a film I’d like to own. I’d like to be able to show it to people (certain people who would appreciate/could handle it). It’s honestly a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking, in maintaining a very specific tone, in managing that sense of dread; all things that (especially) horror filmmakers should have access to. I hope it becomes more readily available soon.

Just as a footnote: the film’s title, as Verdi explained after the screening, is a derogatory term for white people (a bastardization of “caucasoid”), which I only mention because it’s not explained in the film itself, but I think it’s a fabulously perfect title in how the meaning and the almost creature-like imagery it conjures perfectly coalesce in the themes of the film.

Cockazoid is currently unavailable to view but hopefully that will change.
In the meantime, watch the teaser trailer for Sweet Relief, Nick’s next project, here on YouTube.
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