Despite an ominous title, there’s always fair weather in the debut comic adventure film featuring Please Don’t Destroy, a NYC sketch comedy trio that’s hit it big with viral videos and on the long-running NBC series Saturday Night Live. (So long running, in fact, that two of the three are second-generation performers.)
In Treasure of Foggy Mountain, Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall (all in their mid-to-late twenties) portray bro-buddies housemates who embark on a lighthearted and lightly-plotted quest for buried loot. When they lose their map, tensions flare.
Marshall, gangly and ginger-haired, looks like “a Colonial ghost,” according to the even scrawnier Herlihy. Marshall’s reply: “You look like Tim Burton drew you.”
As is typical for an SNL-spawned movie, Treasure meanders. Unusually though, the ratio of jokes to running time remains favorable, even if some of the surprise cameos fail to amaze. Still, director Paul Briganti, an SNL veteran, somehow frames the ongoing silliness with allusions to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Lord of the Rings, and The Goonies. Improbably, the lost boys find their way into a hidden forest village that, if you squint, resembles Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.
Most delightfully, though, Please Don’t Destroy’s snappy, self-deprecating humour embraces co-stars X-May and Megan Stalter, who, as a pair of scheming forest rangers, nearly steal the whole show. Treasure’s unlikely to remembered as anything other than frothy entertainment, but it might be the film that launched a few stars.