Mike More's Sickos, A Movie Review

Docudramedian Mike More is on a roll. (Then he’ll probably eat it. And then an entire pizza.) He is, easily, the best shockumentary filmmaker alive today, not counting foreign people from other countries who don’t lie, or president elects.

He’s given us a movie about car manufacturing and its effect on local automotive advertising (Roger & Them). He’s given us a movie about gun control and its effect on the 7/10 split (Bowling At Columbine High). He’s even given us a movie about 767s and their effect on exploding skyscrapers and insane conspiracy retards (Fahrenheit 101).

This go-around he’s putting his money where his mouth is (then eating it), going after Dr. and Mrs. Greedington, taking on corporate America and blowing the lid off the whole health care insurance industry scam, proving once again that 0.001% of our population controls 99.999% of its health,* in an epic docudrama that poses the question hospitals have been asking ever since they realized they could actually turn a profit if they simply charged not the patient but, rather, the government, and marked up the cost of an x-ray and plaster ‘o Paris by about 2000%, namely, What happens if you get sick and don’t have health insurance?

Answer: You’d die immediately right there on the spot in unspeakable pain while HMO claims adjusters mocked you till you drew your last breath!!! Or you’d get treated and pay it off in installments of 10 dollars per month for 4,179 months, or until you die, whichever comes 2nd.

Sickos pulls zero punches in a whirlwind look at how an iron lung really works. It swings for the fences in its determined gaze to get under your skin, like an IV needle. Or a morphine drip, probably. It slides into third at a company softball game and gives itself a strawberry in the shape of Florida. And it eats its own weight in food at the Lion’s Club picnic.

Highly reminiscent of Morlock Spurgan’s terrific romantrama-mockedy-thrillfi, Supersizing It!, Sickos pleads with its audience, shouting that if you live on nothing but transubstantiated fats and low carbon dating, all the while having exactly zero healthcare insurance, you’re going to roll over in bed and kill your wife again. You can eat crackers in my bed anytime because I’m sleeping single in a double bed thinking over things I should’ve said when country wasn’t cool. (Barbara Mandrell earworms have been known to be fatal in some cases. I once killed a guy in a bar using nothing but “[If Loving You Is Wrong] I Don’t Want To Be Right” and my bare hands, which I didn’t need, turns out.)

But faster than you can go to the “doc in the box” for an ingrown toenail and leave with colon cancer, in comes the savior of the day to save the… day: Socialized Medicine.

That’s right, folks. Medicine as we know it needs to be socialized. For, you see, medicine as we know it has been home schooled through the 9th grade. But don’t you think it’s time for it to get out of the house and meet other kids unsocialized medicine’s age? Roller skating parties, bible camps, religious camps, Jesus Camps, anti-Semitic camps, concentration camps, KKK meetings, or The 33rd Annual Keep America Lighter Skinned Bakesale and Internment Registration, &c., and things of that nature?

And before you can try to refute the intelligent design-friendly theory that people rode domesticated dinosaurs to Sunday School in pre-Macedonian Lithuania, Socialized Medicine cures itself, and Jenna Bush presidentially pardons Dick Chaney, whose cryogenically frozen head has been placed on top of the perennially-tanned body of the seemingly ageless Methuselah himself, George Hamilting, at an undisclosed location at some point in the future.

But I wouldn’t want to give away too many secrets! Still, needless to say, I laughed, I cried, and at the end I stood up and cheered because it had become a part of me.

When the curtain closes and the fat lady sings and is then asked please to leave the All You Care To Eat Bottomless Seafood Buffet at Ryan’s Steakhouse because she’s eaten every last crumb of their seafood, we don’t want movies like Sickos. We need movies like Sickos, if for no other reason than that Mike will leave no turn unstoned when he ruthlessly, relentlessly and unapologetically exposes the very people who are contributing to his morbid obesity. And nobody should have to miss that, really.

*Rerun, I know – too good not to use again