Kevin Smith is best known for his Askewniverse movies such as Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma and others of their ilk, but also had other outings like the uncomfortably weird Tusk, where a podcast host ends up in the clutches of a reclusive madman who proceeds to surgically transform him into a walrus-like abomination. Despite the latter’s story concluding on a definite ending, Smith is of the opinion that a sequel is possible.
Spoilers if you’ve not seen it, but the original movie ends with its rambling captor Howard dead at the, um, tusks of his transformed victim Wallace, who had surrendered to the mental conditioning to which he was subjected and believed himself to truly be the animal his body had been warped into resembling, ending up living in a wildlife sanctuary. Smith’s idea is to take this as a starting point and figure out how to get to where the new story could take place.
“There’s a version of Tusk 2 that you do where you cut to the present, and somebody else gets sucked into the spider’s web. The house, you hear stories, and when you come to the house, the new Howard Howe is Wallace, who has gotten out of the walrus trappings and stuff and is obviously disturbed by his whole ordeal and is now doing it to others. So there’s a way to do Tusk 2 where Justin becomes Michael Parks’s character. So yeah, that’s possible. Tusk 2 is possible.”
Of course, this setup could also have some things to say about PTSD, surviving trauma and how cycles of abuse often lead to survivors inflicting their pain on others as a way of dealing with what happened to them. While there is certainly potential for this in Smith’s pitch to himself, given the demented and comedic bent of the first film’s tone, such introspection might not fit with the intended mood.
Like its follow up of the unfairly maligned Yoga Hosers, Tusk didn’t have the most enthusiastic of receptions, but Smith has made a career out of doing what he wants regardless of what other people say, and making a sequel to one of his least successful films would be entirely in keeping with his professional decisions.
Tell us, though, would you like to see the director do another Tusk movie? As always, let us know down below.
