Quasi Review | Medieval (High) Times

Endearingly gross, goofy, and silly, the Medieval themed comedy Quasi isn’t always fall down hilarious, but it does elicit a lot of chuckles and grins. This latest effort from the Broken Lizard comedy collective is a lot like their other films, where a bunch of collaborating writers and actors play ridiculous characters in a thin plot that’s meant to act as a light layer of glue between a variety of snappy scenarios. It’s the kind of comedy you either like or loathe, and while the Broken Lizard output has been traditionally hit or miss, this is on the high side of their filmography (provided that you already liked something else that they had done previously).

Quasi is an extremely loose updating of The Hunchback of Notre Dame insomuch as there’s a hunchback and it all takes place in Medieval France. Steve Lemme gets the lead this time around as Quasi, the titular hunchback who works alongside his chummy, chipper “hutmate” Duchamp (Kevin Heffernan, also serving as director) at the local torture chamber. Things are heating up in the royal kingdom as King Guy (Jay Chandrasekhar) is about to crown his new queen, Catherine (Adrianne Palicki), just as Pope Cornelius (Paul Soter) is due to arrive for a major celebration. Everyone is excited for Pope Week, and a lottery is held so that one lucky winner can confess their sins to the pope. That lucky winner is Quasi, who quickly gets caught up in political intrigue when the king asks him to kill the pope. Similarly, when he goes for confession, the pope also asks Quasi to kill the king.

There’s a lot of obvious familiarity to Quasi. It’s indebted to the works of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, although not nearly as accomplished as those titans of comedy. It’s an excuse for a bunch of actors to make silly faces and try out purposefully awful accents on a scale that hasn’t really been seen since Adam Sandler ruined everyone’s fun on that front with Little Nicky (which, for the record, I kinda like). The banter is quick and snappy, and the gross out bits are as nasty as they are strange. There are jokes about disgusting foods, bodily waste, royal incest, religious figures that curse a lot, anachronistic nods to modern trends and slang, and medieval bloodlust.

While more jokes start falling flat the longer Quasi goes on, it never really gets on the nerves if you can get on its overall wavelength. Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest, the perennially underrated Club Dread) carved out their niche over twenty years ago now, and they’ve largely stuck to what they think is funny. Nothing about Quasi is overthought, almost as if its a genre send up that’s running purely on instinct. They throw a lot of silliness at the screen and try to figure out what sticks. They look like they’re having fun, but they’re also careful to make sure that the audience is in on the joke, deftly blending gags and set pieces that are witty with a bunch of stuff that’s just blissfully idiotic.

Lemme’s lead performance is a weird, but notable one. Quasi’s screwed up face kinda looks like Sandler in the aforementioned Little Nicky, but he talks and moves like Peter Falk, and despite both of those touchstones, Lemme is still able to make the character uniquely likeable with some genuinely heartfelt touches. (He also plays the king’s doomed, patently unfunny court jester in a nice running gag.) Heffernan once again plays the good sport as the butt of everyone else’s jokes. Soter makes a fine pope, but he’s oddly more memorable in his other role as Quasi’s jerk of a boss down at the torture chamber. Everyone plays their part(s) well, even if that means little more than edging scenes closer towards an intended punchline.

It’s a low budget romp through a bunch of revered tropes that have been skewered better before, but Quasi has no pretensions to be much more than a silly dalliance. The 4/20 release date really tends to underline the intended audience for this one, even still it’s not the only stoner medieval comedy ever made. I wasn’t always laughing out loud during Quasi, but I did have an ear to ear grin on my face. It’s successes are modest, but one can’t argue with a decent formula.

Quasi starts streaming on Disney+ in Canada on Thursday, April 20, 2023.