Every new movie generation delivers its own attitude and aesthetic. I was reminded of this when I first saw Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson ‘s black-and-white Bottle Rocket short in ’94. And I was reminded again today when I caught Andrew Edison and Luke Loftin‘s BINDLESTIFFS early this afternoon at Slamdance. They’re only 20 and 21, respectively, but they’re probably a two-headed version of the new Todd Phillips, or maybe they’re a new hybrid of Wes Anderson mixed with John Waters or something like that. I haven’t quite figured it out.

(l. to r.) Andrew Edison, John Karna, Luke Loftin following’s today’s BUNDLESTIFFS screening.

Set in Houston, BINDLESTIFFS is raw and outrageous at times, but often quite funny in a scattershot deadpan fashion. It’s fast and brazen and lewd, and as hip in its own curious way as Tiny Furniture but way, way crazier and goofier and (this being a testosterone comedy) driven by erections. It has a certain manic energy that I haven’t gotten from any Sundance film this year, and it revels in absurdist raunch.

It looks and sounds ragged (like it was shot on a family home-video camera in the late ’90s) but it could play right now in theatres and make a decent pile of change. I didn’t laugh out loud all that much, but then I’m more of a heh-heh type of guy. I was comforted by the fact that Edison-Loftin know from farce, and that their film is smart, nervy and extreme.

I was especially impressed by the fact that BINDLESTIFFS was blocked out action-wise but entirely and hilariously improvised in terms of dialogue. These guys are really good at keeping the ball in the air and batting it around.

It starts out in a semi-farcical, rat-a-tat vein that reminded me of the Bottle Rocket short, principally due to the three leads — Loftin, Edison and John Karna — playfully bouncing off each other’s personalities and proclaiming their allegiance to J.D. Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye, which their high-school has just banned from the curriculum. But when they all get suspended for an idiotic non-reason things suddenly shift into Road Trip-without-a-car meets Better Off Dead meets Pink Flamingoes or…whatever, you figure it out.

The only difficult aspect is the film’s callous attitude about a mangy homeless woman who is photographed without a face as a kind of “thing”, and treated by two of the three leads as a sub-life form, a dog. It’s not funny to me when you completely remove a person’s dignity, even that of a filthy, gray-haired skank. But many in the audience today were laughing.

The only issue is that an R rating will be impossible, and trying to cut BINDLESTIFFS down in order to get an R would defeat its whole purpose. It’s not in the comic realm of Superbad (guys like Jonah Hill come along very rarely), but it does have its own personality and ‘tude and way of delivering a joke.

Two or three or four films from now Edison-Loftin could deliver the next $100 million comedy…maybe. It’s hard to predict who’s really got it or not, but these guys definitely understand themselves and have come up with a kind of humor that feels and plays a little differently than what I’ve been suffering through in the plexes over the last two or three or four years.