Crew
Director – Ryan Nicholson, Screenplay – Patrick Coble & Ryan Nicholson, Photography – Jay Gavin, Visual Effects – Cory Bradshaw, Special Effects – Jon Funk, Prosthetic Characters Designed & Created by Michelle Grady. Production Company – Plotdigger Films.
Cast
Nathan Dashwood (Hanger), Dan Ellis (The John), Wayne Gibb (Russell), Ronald Patrick Thompson (Leroy), Debbie Rochon (Rose), Candice Le (Nicole), Rochelle Lynn-Jones (Foxy White), Alistair Gamble (Phil), Nadia Gray (Smashy), Stephanie Walker (Trashy), Randy Jones (The Foreman), Lloyd Kaufman (Melvina the Tranny), Susan Arum (Jehovah Witless), Michelle Grady (Trixie the Mangled Whore)
Plot
The prostitute Rose is beaten up by her pimp Leroy after he finds she is pregnant. Leroy then holds Rose down and performs a coat hanger abortion, killing her in the process. The foetus is thrown away but is rescued by a homeless man and grows up on the streets. Hanger is so disfigured he hides his face. John, Rose’s john who is Hanger’s father, comes and takes him away on his eighteenth birthday. John gets Hanger a job at a junkyard and lodgings there alongside the depraved Russell. John plots revenge against Leroy for killing Rose, the woman he loved.
Canadian director Ryan Nicholson was a makeup artist on numerous films and tv series including Final Destination (2000), Scary Movie (2000), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), Ghost Rider (2007), Blair Witch (2016), Warcraft (2016), Altered Carbon (2018-20) and The Predator (2018). Nicholson made his directorial debut with Torched (2004), followed by Live Feed (2006) and then had a modest hit with Gutterballs (2008). Hanger was Nicholson’s fourth film and he went on to direct the likes of Bleading Lady/Star Vehicle (2010), Famine (2011), Alarming (2013), Dead Nude Girls (2013) and Collar (2014), as well as episodes of the anthologies Necrophagia: Nightmare Scenarios (2004) and Hell Hath No Fury (2006). Nicholson passed away from cancer in 2019 aged 48.
Ryan Nicholson’s films go places that other more mild-mannered filmmakers would balk at doing. His films revel in sordid Bad Taste and cross well over lines that others would consider offensive. In the opening scene of Hanger alone, there is a nasty and uncomfortable to watch scene where pimp Ronald Patrick Thompson holds down hooker Debbie Rochon and forcibly gives her a coat hanger abortion – one that is replete with shots of the hanger going inside the vagina and gouging it amid gouts of blood – and then of the aborted foetus being flung away.
Much of Hanger is a parade of similar scenes that are determined to rub our faces in sordid disgust and gross-out factor. Among other things, we see:- a hooker’s head repeatedly crushed in a car door; Hanger and Wayne Gibb grabbing a woman Jehovah’s Witness (Susan Arum) who comes to the door and molesting her with Hanger biting off her nipples and then devouring her intestines. A worker in the junkyard comes in and anally rapes both Hanger and Wayne Gibb, where we see his dick going in asses as diarrhoeic shit gushes out everywhere. And then there is the character of Wayne Gibb’s Russell who is played as a bad racial caricature of a Chinese with nasally pitched sing-song voice who has a fetish for used tampons, which he uses to make tea. At one point, he drugs secretary Candice Le to remove her bloody tampon.
The plot is fairly shapeless, mostly just stuff that happens around the junkyard. To this extent, the film resembles something of Street Trash (1987), another low-budget epic of makeup effects and bad taste. The only thing that does give the happenings a drive is the B plot that emerges where John the john (Dan Ellis) sets out to take revenge against pimp Ronald Patrick Thompson for the killing of Debbie Rochon.
Trailer here