bad trip how did they film

Where 'Eric Andre' Ends and Eric Andre Begins

With his new prank film Bad Trip , the comedian takes his art form to new heights. But who is he when he's not terrorizing unsuspecting marks for the camera?

“I’m losing my mind,” Eric Andre tells me as we greet each other over Zoom in early February. Alone in his living room, hunched uncomfortably above his webcam, he’s not the manic, human Tasmanian devil I’m expecting to see on the other end of the Zoom call. “I'm just in the fucking purgatory of promoting the movie,” he says.

It’s Groundhog Day, and our call had already started on a weird note. Before he answered, I was sitting here in Brooklyn for our scheduled appointment time, two thousand miles away from his home in LA, waiting in anticipation for him to appear. Something was wrong, though–Andre was nowhere to be found.

When I finally get Andre on the line (turns out he’d taken an unexpected mid-afternoon nap), he seems uncharacteristically reserved. Shifting restlessly from room to room, position to position, at-times sitting cross-legged in front of the camera, on his stomach, his side, or even standing in his kitchen as I try in vain to keep our interview on the rails, this guy appears almost nothing like the “Eric Andre” he plays on TV. And yet, the stories he tells me about his life and career are nonetheless every bit as chaotic and unhinged as you’d expect.

We’re speaking shortly following the announcement that his long-lost passion project, Bad Trip , will finally be reaching audiences by way of a Netflix release on March 26. Its original SXSW premiere, like with so many others, had been cancelled when all of life shut down in the early months of the pandemic. Its theatrical run, of course, got the ax, too. “I demanded, I wanted it to come out. I demanded I want to have that red carpet moment for all the pain...It was painstaking.”

“It'll be seven and a half years,” he tells me now. “I think October of 2013 is when we started talking about making it.” This film, which marries traditional narrative comedy with pranks that actually advance the plot, is like the culmination of his entire career–his reality-defying pranks in The Eric Andre Show , his comedic acting in series like Man Seeking Woman and 2 Broke Girls , even his recent stand-up special, Legalize Everything , in which Andre finally reveals his comedic voice outside the guise of his exhibitionist madman character–it’s all present in Bad Trip .

Teaming up with Jeff Tremaine of Jackass fame, Andre set out to hide a prank movie inside a Hollywood comedy. Centered around Andre and co-stars Lil Rel Howery and Tiffany Haddish, Bad Trip is a buddy comedy where the buddy part is fiction...and the comedy is Jackass . Somehow, if you can believe it, it works. It really, really works.

But probably not for the reasons you’d expect. If you’re a fan of The Eric Andre Show , you already know that most of Andre’s humor comes from his ability to be, well, a professional nuisance. Tormenting unsuspecting civilians on his piping hot talk show set (he keeps it hot to keep his guests on their toes), to cramped subway cars, salad bars, and in the middle of running traffic, The Eric Andre Show tends to push people to their social limits–all for a laugh, of course. In Bad Trip , it’s a little bit inverted. Andre and his co-stars, more often than not, are the ones thrown into nightmarishly compromising positions. He doesn’t die, thankfully. But he comes pretty damn close.

“This character is not the same character from The Eric Andre Show ,” he tells me, his eyes lighting up when he talks about the work. “This character has to be likable, and we realized early on, none of my actions can be intentionally destructive. So every situation I walk into, I can't just be like, ‘Fuck you, I'm breaking shit, I'm naked, woo, woo.’ Everything has to be this Chris Farley, Tommy Boy , accidental hapless boob. I have to be just a golden retriever puppy that's just knocking dishes around, you know what I mean?”

It wasn’t as easy as just letting a golden retriever loose on the Eric Andre set, though. Bad Trip required a complete reevaluation of the shtick–which took years to pull off. “ The Eric Andre Show is 11 minutes. Each episode, it's a quarter hour show. So I can be as completely psychotic and deranged and dysfunctional as any personality has ever been on television. Movies, features–for something with a 90-minute runtime or longer, it has different rules, there's different principles–the protagonist or protagonists have to be grounded, they have to be likable, you have to root for them, you have to identify with them, and it needs a narrative structure to get across that much footage or else the audience checks out and they're not invested.”

He tells me that part of the key to that code was Jackass mastermind Jeff Tremaine, who acted as kind of a godfather to the crew–not to mention fellow prank gods Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen, both of whom pitched in during the creative process as well. “[Tremaine] had to harness the comedic style and spirit of The Eric Andre Show , but make it function as a movie. And it was a lot of work. He was molding clay, because I was fighting it a lot. I was trying to, because I really wanted my comedy to be authentic. I was almost cocky in a naive way. I thought the rules of movies don't apply.”

It’s sort of disorienting to process the irony that, for Eric Andre to really transcend in the prank artform that he has been almost single-handedly bringing into the modern day, he had to become the voice of reason, the “straight man” of his pranks. Like, in Bad Trip , when Andre hops into the gorilla pen at the zoo and gets sodomized by a dude in a gorilla suit in front of a crowd of unwitting (and totally real) zoo patrons, he’s no longer Taz–he’s Daffy Duck. He’s calling for help. And, if you can believe it, people come rushing to help. We want to help the guy.

If Andre Show is a litmus test for how quickly people will run from clear and present danger (like, a man in a cheese helmet spewing Kraft cheese), Bad Trip is the opposite, always showing the lengths at which a person will go to help a stranger. In nearly all the film’s many pranks, there’s a standout bystander, a memorable, and impossibly generous, performance from someone who has no idea they’re in a movie.

Towards the big finale, Howery and Andre crash their car and waddle out of the wreck, disoriented, fighting with each other. The car goes up in flames–and people come running to help. “Everybody ran over,” Andre recalls. “And then we start crawling out and arguing with each other, as these people are putting this fresh car accident together. They're like, ‘Oh my God, somebody call 911.’” Entering the fray is a gentleman with dreadlocks who gives one of the most convincingly sympathetic–and human–performances in recent memory. Except he’s not performing. “That guy with the dreads was probably the best mark in the movie. He's so invested and on the hook and good natured. I showed Jon Favreau a cut of the movie and he was like, ‘I thought that guy was an actor all the way to the end’...I go, ‘No, that guy was real.’ That guy was like Dr. Phil. He looked like Migos. Rel was like, ‘He looks like Migos and he acts like Dr. Phil.’”

Of course, not everybody is uncommonly kind to Andre I ask him if he’s ever actually thought he might be killed, and, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m baffled to hear him go through the multiple occasions in which his life was on the line. Two of the most recent of these close-calls (to my knowledge) can be seen in Bad Trip , making the movie qualify as somewhat of a snuff film, I guess. The second one happens briefly during a clip reel in the end credits, where we see a bar patron nearly crack Andre’s skull open with a bottle of Jim Beam after Andre projectile vomits all over the entire establishment.

The earlier one is already a fairly-well known stunt, if you can even call it that. Midway through the film, Andre and Howery wake up, to their surprise, with their penises stuck together in a finger trap. Running all over the streets (and golf courses) of Atlanta searching for help, the genitally-conjoined idiots end up at, in Andre’s words, a “hood-ass barbershop,” where the joke promptly ends. “The guy in the barbershop tried to murder us, and he was like, ‘You're lucky I didn't have my gun on me today.’ And yes we were.” Their penises may have been fake. But the knife in that barber’s hand was very, very real.

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“I would say the gnarliest was the Alex Jones RNC Trump rally,” he tells me, reminiscing about being caught in a MAGA clusterfuck back in 2016, when he took his Eric Andre crew to the Republican National Convention–and promptly had his press pass revoked. With his baggy grey suit, gigantic boom-mounted microphone, and nonsense jokes about Myspace and nihilism, he wasn’t exactly a welcome presence there. “It's an open carry state. It was literally a Bikers for Trump rally. Alex Jones was speaking, and I was surrounded by the alt-right so everyone was packing, and I was being a nuisance in a mosh pit of alt-right jabronis.”

He admits that his life was threatened there, though downplays the danger, saying “I'm from Florida, so being in a mosh pit of alt-right jabroans is like just going to any metal show...This is just like a hardcore show at a fucking shitty Fort Lauderdale venue.”

Having seen this side of America up close, Andre says he wasn’t surprised by the insurrectionist riot at the Capitol on January 6.

“I'm not surprised by any American racism or jingoism,” he tells me. “This country is very racist and violent. I'm not surprised by any of it. That's the history of the country.”

Andre mentions his anxiety off and on a few times in our conversation. When I tell him that, because of his Andre Show persona, if I saw him at a restaurant, I’d run the other way, he relates that people sometimes do seem to be afraid of Eric Andre–the real one, not just the talk show host. “I took a SoulCycle class and the woman in there actually came up to me after the class and she was like, ‘I was so fucking nervous the whole time. I was just looking at you like, fuck, I don't want to be in a prank.’ And I was like, ‘No, I'm just exercising.’”

He tells me that pranking is “very anxiety-provoking.”

“So, meditation helps with my anxiety a lot,” he says. “I always battle with anxiety. I think everybody does, though. You know what I mean?” I ask him if his comedy is a form of relief for anxiety too, and he says, “Yeah. I think so. For sure.”

Since everything about Andre is self-deprecating, it’s hard to tell if he’s ever being serious. When we spoke before, he was promoting his role as one of the evil hyenas in the upcoming Lion King remake, at that time rounding the bases toward another season of his Adult Swim show, with Bad Trip looming in the background. Listening back on that call, Andre sounds positively ecstatic. Now, like all of us, he seems, well, uncertain about his artistic future.

While he admits to me that he’s been writing, he won’t let on too much. “It’s not even just a contractual obligation, it's more like, superstitious. I don't like talking about it.” Writing or not, it seems Andre’s been devoting the bulk of his isolation time doing what everyone else is doing: just trying to keep it together. “I took Spanish lessons, I'm taking singing lessons, I took a yakitori grilling lesson. I've been making cocktails, buying all these cocktail books. Cooking, I got a Traeger. I got a sauna. I'm living a Joe Rogan life. I'm doing psychedelics, sweating bullets in a sauna, and smoking meats.”

Our conversation, which started in a lull, ends in an even stranger place. During the pandemic, Andre has been biding his time getting into cocktails and mixology. Not, like, rum and coke mixology (though he does insist there’s “nothing wrong with a Cuba Libre”). He’s immersed himself in piles of mixology literature, showing me book after book as he sits in front of his giant liquor display. Riffing on some of the sillier concoctions he’s discovered in his travels, Andre says, “The ingredients are like, ‘A hit of acid, Plan B, snoot of Adderall, and a hit of whiskey.”

I say, “I think people who don't really understand absurd comedy always think that comedians are just on drugs. Like, ‘You must get high and just goof around!’ It seems like that's not really your approach, though, is it?” And Andre responds, saying that, “maybe,” drugs affect his work in an “indirect way,” but that “typically, drugs are recreation. I'm not eating mushrooms or acid and writing. I'm like, going to Joshua Tree and eating mushrooms.”

I probably should have asked him to elaborate, but it seems like his patience for these kinds of questions has all but worn out. That’s all in the rear-view. Whereas at first I was able to keep him with me by asking about his comedy, his pranks, his new movie, now I feel like I’m getting sucked into his gravitational pull. I’m in Eric Andre World. Drifting away, my pile of questions floating behind, I wonder where he’s about to bring us.

“I really want to huff xenon,” He says, straight-faced. “That's my new frontier.”

“What is xenon?” I ask.

“Xenon is an element on the Periodic Table of Elements. But if you huff it, if you huff the gas, it's like a super nitrous. It's like the greatest champagne of whippets. Very rare, very expensive.”

“What experience does it give to you?”

“Euphoria," he says. "Heavenly bliss.”

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How Much of ‘Bad Trip’ Is Real? How Eric Andre Pulled Off Those Epic Pranks

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Believe it: Eric Andre ‘s Netflix movie Bad Trip is about as real as prank movies get. Those who watch The Eric André Show already know that the absurdist comedian has no qualms about wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting general public. But for Bad Trip , André teamed up with producer Jeff Tremaine—best known as the director of the Jackass franchise—to create an actual story connected to his wild pranks.

In the film, André stars as a car wash employee named Chris who has a chance encounter with his crush from high school, Maria (played by Bones actor Michaela Conlin). Maria tells Chris to visit her in New York, so Chris enlists his best friend Bud (comedian Lil Rel Howery ) to embark on a road trip. The two friends borrow a car from Chris’s sister, Trina (played by Tiffany Haddish ), not knowing that she has recently broken out of prison.

That story is fictional, but the absurd things these characters do on their “road trip” are real things that the Bad Trip production did to real people.

How much of Bad Trip is real?

Every reaction to a prank you see in Bad Trip is real. In an interview with Decider , Andre explained that while there are actors who work with the production to help pull off his pranks on real people, you never see their reactions on screen. “Our whole thing is that there’s not a single fake reaction in the movie,” André said. “We never had people pretend they were in shock or anything. We had like an ethos about it. Because even if there’s one fake reaction in the movie, it jeopardizes all the rest of them.”

That said, André did not really cut off his hand in a blender or get into a horrific car accident, as you see his character experience in the film. Those are carefully planned pranks intended to fool the public involving professional stunt performers, fake blood, and gorilla suits. Read more about how André pulled off the stunts below.

Are the people in Bad Trip actors?

Very few of the people you see on screen—besides Andre, Howery, Tiffany Haddish as Trina, and Michaela Conlin as Maria—are actors. As the end-credits scene reveals, that Army guy who gave André solid life advice and then took a hit of his vape was real. The worker who thought he was helping Tiffany Haddish escape from prison was real. The bisexual waitress who doled out love advice was real. The guy with the dreadlocks and tie-dye shirt who helped André with the car crash was real, too—though Andre told Decider that he fooled Iron Man director Jon Favreau with that one.

“Even the guy in that scene—the guy with the dreadlocks and the peace sign that was really helping us out? I showed the movie to Jon Favreau, an early cut of it and he goes, ‘Dude, I thought even that guy was an actor until the end credits, where you show all the reveals!'” André said. “So that’s what I want to stress and reiterate: We go to these great lengths because we want every single reaction to be authentic. You feel the authenticity and the reactions.”

Eric André and Lil Rel Howery really got chased out of a barbershop in Bad Trip:

Yes. Andre explained to Decider how that prank went down:

It was one of the first days we were filming and crews were still getting on their feet. [We got sent to] the wrong barbershop. So our hidden camera ops were in another barbershop a few doors down. We got sent to the wrong place! That’s why there’s only the exterior shot, unfortunately. But you caught the tail end of it—basically, we went in there, Rel and I, and our penises are stuck in the Chinese finger trap. We entered this like, really hood barbershop, we went to the guy and I said, “Hey sir, sorry to bother you…” And he’s like giving a guy a haircut! He’s giving the guy a fade! [Laughs.] “Excuse me sir, we got our dick caught in a Chinese finger trap. Can we borrow those scissors and you can cut us out of this thing?” And the guy was just like, “Aw, hell no!” And he had like murder rage in his eyes and he looked for a gun. He told us later that he left his gun at home and he usually doesn’t. Thank God. Looked for the gun, grabbed his knife, and then chased us out. Then you can kind of see the rest. And I was stuck in this dick trap contraption, so I can’t run! So I’m like, “Ahh!” Me and Rel are like going in opposite directions. It was like Laurel and Hardy.

The “dick trap contraption,” however, was not André and Howery’s real penises, but prosthetics. That didn’t make the fear any less real, however. In an interview for the press notes, producer Jeff Tremaine said, “You know, this guy ran out with a knife, and it’s not very easy to run away when you’re connected by prosthetic penises.”

Tiffany Haddish really fooled a city worker into helping her escape from prison:

Obviously, Tiffany Haddish did not really escape from prison, but the Bad Trip production really did trick that city worker into thinking that she had.

“One of the best reactions in the whole thing is when Tiffany escapes off the prison bus,” producer Jeff Tremaine said in an interview for the press notes. “A guy is cleaning graffiti off a wall as this prison bus pulls up. The guard gets out, walks past him, and all of a sudden Tiffany drops out of the bottom of the bus and starts talking to the guy. And the guy, looking out for her, tells her ‘You gotta go. You gotta get out of here.’ I had no idea that she would be so good at the hidden camera game. She’s just a natural at taking people for a ride.”

Eric André lured real people to a new zoo opening for the gorilla prank:

Andre pulled back the curtain on how he pulled off the bit where he was attacked and violated by a gorilla for Decider. He said:

We would do stuff like put stuff on Craigslist, like, “New zoo just opened up, free admission, bring a friend and you’ll get free food!” We would entice people like that. When you film in a location, you have to get permission for the location because it’s a private place of business. But we’re not pranking anybody that’s in on it. Nobody that’s in on it is in the frame. We’re not cutting to a reaction of a zoo worker like “Oh my god!” So, we had the Zoo master who worked there corralling the people we were pranking into the “prank cage,” as it was in that zoo. When you’re shooting in a private location, six hours out of that 12 hour day is the art department and the camera department setting up their hides and their cameras—robo-cams, little backpack cameras, little tiny GoPros hidden in fake bushes. It’s like a CIA operation. You have the art department building fake trees and fake animal cages. The camera department is rigging these like hidden cameras. So, to be able to do that you need to get permission from whatever location you’re pranking. However, you don’t show the people. Anybody that’s in on it is not featured in the image.

Bad Trip used a stunt driver to stage a real car crash:

Andre also walked Decider through how he faked the car crash, which involved tricking a group of people in Atlanta who thought they were on an Art Walk. He said:

Our stunt coordinator, who’s a precision driver, did the car stunt: drove the car, flipped the car—I think it’s called the sidewinder—flipped it, boom! The car crashed. He got out, we made sure he was safe. Then as makeup is putting fake blood and scratches all over Rel and I, we ran into the flipped car, got in position. That group of people that we were pranking, they thought they were on an “Art Walk of Atlanta,” like a graffiti Street Art Walk. So one of my producers is pretending they’re a street art curator, like a block and a half, two blocks away. He has his earphones in like an iPhone earbud, but that’s really his communication. So the other producers are right, like, “Alright, Charlie flipped the car. Alright, Rel and Eric are in place. Cue the art group.” So then he’s like, “Ah, that brings me to my next part. Here’s a piece of graffiti that blah blah blah… Oh, my God, a horrible car accident!” [ Laughs .] “Oh my god, that car just crashed!” Then he ran over, then everybody else in the group is like, “What?” Then they ran over. And then, you know, Rel and I start crawling out of like, shattered glass all in a daze.

The Bad Trip musical number took weeks of rehearsal, and two separate shoots:

In an interview for the Bad Trip press notes, Andre and director Kitao Sakurai explained that the film’s musical number was filmed in two public locations: Once in Atlanta, and once at a mall in Los Angeles.

“The first time it was too much of a ‘guerilla style’ thing,” Andre said, “and we realized we needed to shoot it really beautifully and cinematically — as cinematic as a hidden camera movie can be, and make it feel like Singing in the Rain. The version that made it into the movie is the cannibalized version of both the old shoot and the new shoot.”

André even took dancing lessons.  “I was rehearsing at the mall weeks before we shot, going over the location, and even secretly going to dance studios,” says Andre. “All that work paid off because, by the time we filmed, I felt actually good about my dancing which is typically very embarrassing for me.”

Eric André really did dangle from a roof for the Bad Trip finale… with an added precaution:

In an interview for the film’s press notes, director Kitao Sakurai explained that Haddish was secretly holding a camouflaged safety cable that was secured to the rooftop, in order to make sure André didn’t really fall. “We didn’t fake it or cheat it,” Sakurai said. “Everything you’re seeing is legitimately real. The fact that people fully believed that this crazy dangerous thing was happening and that they decided to get involved, that they decided to take it upon themselves to try and get Tiffany to pull Eric up onto the roof, was incredible.”

André added that the production did have a few of their own people in the crowd to encourage the reactions. “The people on the street were so engaged with what she was doing that they didn’t really notice that we had a guy down there, passing them a megaphone to help them negotiate.”

So there you have it! Hearing all the work that goes into making a movie like Bad Trip , it’s no wonder that it took five years to make. And be sure to stick around for the Bad Trip credits, which features footage of the moment that André and his team revealed to the people they were pranking that they’re on a hidden camera show. It’s all in good fun.

Watch Bad Trip on Netflix

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A smoothie shop employee with butterflies in his stomach and a bleeding right hand sits next to an older gentleman on a bench. “Can I ask you something?” he prefaces. The worker then proceeds to babble about his crush, Maria. Should he follow her to New York City, and leave Florida behind? The older man offers advice—speaking from the heart—and it fills the younger man’s soul, so much that he leaps from the bench and bursts into song. It’s this young guy’s big romantic moment, and he dances away before almost getting hit by a car, and then sings at people inside a mall, in which one patron tries to side-kick him.  

This hilarious sequence, which overlaps cliché storytelling with the unassuming public, is just one of many endearing moments in “Bad Trip,” a hidden camera comedy gem starring Eric André , Lil Rel Howery , and Tiffany Haddish that’s finally coming out on Netflix. Directed by Kitao Sakurai , the previous director behind numerous episodes of “The Eric André Show,” it shows an evolution in the hidden camera subgenre, given its warming spirit about people. Unlike the films that previously defined the subgenre, it’s not so much about creating a freak show from unsuspecting extras, but in noting what one would do when confronted with someone as delusional as André’s character Chris. Natural human behavior can be extremely funny, and Sakurai and André know it’s possible to bring it out of people without being mean-spirited. Footage in the end credits of the real people excited to learn that they’re in a movie—a comfort for us as well—confirms the chaos is controlled physically and emotionally, and that allows it to be a party.    

“Bad Trip” is an excellent showcase for Eric André—it’s more mainstream than his talk-show-in-hell “The Eric André Show” and less watered down than his recent resume-boosting, commercial work like “The Lion King” and elsewhere. This role lets him scream, sprint, crash into things, and show off that he’s a sweetheart who wants to include you his absurdity. It’s no stretch to say that André is going to be a huge comedic force—I knew this when I caught his Legalize Everything stand-up tour in Chicago in 2019, when he had a sold-out Chicago Theater completely wrapped up in his FaceTime-ing with the parents of random audience members. He’s an affable anarchist with Robin Williams-like verve, and this project lets his burgeoning persona run wild alongside what the film advertises as “Real People. Real Pranks.”  

André's hilarious earnest Chris is joined in the movie by Lil Rel Howery, who would have been known enough at the time of filming from his scene-stealing turn in “ Get Out ,” but is disguised as Chris’ reserved friend Bud. They have adorable chemistry as two friends in Florida who decide to drive to New York to reunite Chris with his high school crush Maria ( Michaela Conlin ) after two disastrous brief run-ins at Eric’s jobs. They support each other, like when Chris gets extremely drunk at a cowboy bar, or Bud finds himself inside a Porta Potty. Chris is the wide-eyed dreamer, and Bud is the demure rationalist. Their chemistry is as pure as the Golden Girls, so “Thank You For Being a Friend” is featured prominently in the soundtrack, in between scenes of slapstick pranks that further their road trip.  

When Bud and Chris need a car to get to New York City, they “borrow” the bright pink Crown Vic that belongs to Bud’s sister, Trina (Tiffany Haddish), who Bud fears but is relieved when she's put in jail for breaking house arrest. And yet soon enough, Haddish crawls out from under a prison bus, having broken out and starts looking for her car. When it’s not where she stored it, she hunts Bud and Chris up the Eastern seaboard, making for some incredibly funny, abrasive scenes of her confronting people about whether they’ve seen them or her car that has “Bad Bitch” written on the window. Haddish bulldozes into every set-piece, exemplifying the film’s over-the-top spirit. When talking to progressively uncomfortable strangers, she doesn’t miss a beat and she relishes the opportunity to appear dangerous; when she steals a cop car and burns out of a donut shop parking lot, it’s one of her many triumphant moments.  

“Bad Trip” is a collision of great improvisational actors and authentically bewildered reactions from people unaware that they’re now in Chris’ story—which makes Michaela Conlin’s performance as Maria all the more an essential middle to its Venn diagram. She enters the movie also as an innocent bystander, but that’s a deceptive comic energy that plays out in very funny ways as she pushes back against Chris’ delusions. In Chris’ prank-based daydreams, Conlin matches André’s intensity; that she has to play it straight in later scenes adds to the tension she creates, like when Chris tries to profess his love to her.  

Just how funny is “Bad Trip”? After two viewings, it’s one of those comedies with a stable laughing average and high replay value, even if it doesn’t always hit you as hard. It knowingly plays a hit-and-miss game, and some scenes don’t entirely work (like a grocery store drug trip that plays out like a soft tribute to “The Eric Andre Show”), while other pranks go for discomfort more than big laughs (like when Chris gets gas springing all over a gas station). But the movie has speediness on its side, with pacing that takes the plotting from one prank to the next, often including crowds of people in the latest big dramatic confrontation that comes from Bud and Chris’ expected emotional arc. (A sudden car crash sequence is particularly well planned out, with cameras and extras ready nearby.) It’s a steady build to its ultimate destination of NYC, and every major set piece is constructed to bubble with discomfort before then skyrocketing over the top. An early scene at Chris’ smoothie shop job only begins with him making the drinks without spoons—it escalates to awkward tension with disgusted, annoyed customers, and then boom, a laugh-out-loud, gory finale that hits with impeccable, unexpected timing.  

If certain parts of “Bad Trip” aren’t as out-and-out cry-laughing as the work put into them desires, the story is still involving as it adds the dimensionality of unscripted human behavior. And it doesn’t continue the hidden camera movie’s waning intention of dunking on dummies, a factor that also makes this story more fluid than the start-and-stop traps, primed for reaction shots, in something like “Jackass”-spinoff like “Bad Grandpa.” That’s the true sweet spot, in how its pranks are engineered to get the unexpected to interact with Bud, Chris, and or Trina, and see if strangers try to help. (“You turned on us!” says Chris, after a golfer starts swinging a club at Chris and Bud while their penises are enjoined by a Chinese fingertrap.) An amazing scene comes at a tense mid-point, when Trina appears at a restaurant, spreading around fliers with Bud and Chris’ dopey faces on them, advertising her desire to kill the two. She leaves. Bud and Chris then show up at the same place minutes later, and everyone’s response, with some people trying to warn them, and others not wanting to get caught in the middle, is incredible. “Bad Trip” knows how to stir things up, and its funniest scenes often involve real people getting in the mix, tested by the brilliant skills of André, Howery, and Haddish. The ways that some people react to their pranks might shock you in some ways, and absolutely will not in others.  

Now available on Netflix.

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film Credits

Bad Trip (2021)

Rated R for crude sexual content, pervasive language, some graphic nudity and drug use.

Eric André as Chris

Lil Rel Howery as Bud

Tiffany Haddish as Trina Malone

Michaela Conlin as Maria Li

• Kitao Sakurai

Writer (story)

• Andrew Barchilon

Cinematographer

• Andrew Laboy
• Sascha Stanton Craven
• Matthew Kosinski
• Caleb Swyers
• Ludwig Göransson
• Joseph Shirley

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Screen Rant

Bad trip: 10 best behind-the-scenes facts about the eric andre netflix movie.

Eric Andre is known for his wild public pranks and these behind-the-scenes facts about Bad Trip make the Netflix movie even funnier.

Filmed over the course of four years , the absurdist movie  Bad Trip is full of shocking encounters, hearty laughs, and a lot of cringeworthy moments. Eric Andre and Lil Rel Howery as best friends Chris and Bud, and Tiffany Haddish in the scene-stealing role as Trina, are hilarious together. But like with The Eric Andre Show , what fans really love are the reactions of real people caught on hidden camera as they unknowingly become part of a movie.

RELATED:  10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About The Making Of Bridgerton

Having received generally positive reviews , the movie is one that's worth watching again and again to catch subtleties that are easy to miss the first time around. And it's especially funny to watch again after knowing some of the wild behind-the-scenes facts about the making of the movie.

They Were Really Chased By Someone

That scene where an angry store owner ran behind the pair during the Chinese finger trap prank (which involved prosthetics) was actually real. Andre said they went to the wrong barbershop that didn’t have their hidden cameras inside and the owner was not happy about the debauchery.

The man chased them out the door with a knife in the scene that just so happened to be the first prank filmed for the movie .   Once the man learned it was a joke and for television, he settled down and actually found it hilarious . But Andre and Howery legitimately feared for their lives in that moment.

Haddish Asked To Be In The Movie

Tiffany Haddish wasn't originally in the movie. After Howery, who had never done a prank on camera before – he's best known for his role in the Oscar-winning movie Get Out   - encountered the major scare noted above, he called his reps and Haddish, with whom he co-starred on Carmichael Show , to vent.

Haddish, a movie star in her own right , called Andre inquiring about the situation and decided right then and there that she wanted to be in the movie . It all worked out as there was a scheduling conflict with the actor who was originally supposed to be in the role, so Haddish took over.

None Of The Reactions Were Fake

While viewers might be skeptical that some of the onlooker reactions were fake and featured paid actors, Andre assures that isn't the case. "Every reaction in the movie is 100 percent real",  he told Den of Geek . Everything in the movie was genuine.

RELATED: The Eric Andre Show: 10 Funniest Hannibal Buress Quotes, Ranked  

The only parts of the movie that were scripted were the main story and the dialogue between Chris, Bud, Trina, and Maria, played by Michaela Conlin.

The Zookeepers Were In On The Prank

When Chris jumped into a cage with a gorilla (really a human in a lifelike gorilla suit), the people taking the zoo tour were all really there on a visit and had no idea what was going on. But the zookeepers were in on the joke.

That's because the scene was shot in a private location so they had to get permission. The camera department set up hidden cameras all over , including backpack cameras, GoPros hidden in fake bushes, and more, to capture real-life reactions.

They Had Help From Master Pranksters

The crew had members that were master pranksters who provided assistance and advice . That included Jeff Tremaine, the movie's producer, who had previously directed the Jackass movies and Dirty Grandpa .

There was also help from members of the Punk'd team as well as Nathan Fielder from Nathan For You and some of his writers. A master of disguise and hidden camera pranks in his own right, Sacha Baron Cohen also helped Andre by screening a rough cut of the movie and helping out with the story aspect.

A Car Really Did Flip Over

One of the scenes that was real but that did not actually involve the actor was when the car flipped over and caught fire. This really did happen but it was all handled safely by a stunt driver who flipped the car to get the shot that shocked passersby.

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Once the car was flipped and the stunt driver snuck out, Andre and Howery, fully made up with fake blood and scratches, swept in to make it look like they were emerging from the vehicle, dazed and injured.

The Guy In The Dreadlocks Was Not An Actor

Anyone who watched beyond the end credits saw the outtakes that included a clip of the moment the truth was revealed to the unsuspecting people. One of the biggest surprises was the wonderful young man with the dreadlocks who did his best to break up the supposed fight between Chris and Bud.

In the heartwarming scene, the man took it upon himself to act as a mediator and help two friends mend fences. He also physically held Chris back, even though, of course, Andre was just acting. The man was the personification of the Good Samaritan who went out of his way to help two people he didn't even know.

They Chose Strategic Locations To Avoid Getting Recognized

Not surprisingly, Andre and Howery got recognized a few times and had to re-shoot scenes. But they used the "know your audience" guide to help determine shooting locations and the types of crowds to surround themselves with.

Andre told AV Club that they focused on pranking people over 40 since his audience typically skews younger. So, they avoided places like skate parks or college campuses. Nonetheless, they did get recognized a few times and had to relocate. When they did come across someone they suspected might have recognized them, they used the code word "Phyllis"  to advise a PA to intercept the person and politely ask them to keep it to themselves so they could continue filming.

The Entire White Chicks Prank Had To Be Filmed Twice

The hilarious scene at the end of the movie, inspired by the movie White Chicks , which Chris and Bud reference throughout the movie, actually had to be filmed twice. The first time in Atlanta, partygoers were so angered that they refused to sign the release forms .

It resulted in a huge added expense to the budget, though Andre admits that he and Howery were potentially "a little too aggressive" with the prank the first time around. The second time was filmed in Los Angeles and they toned down their acts.

An Exorcism Was Pulled From The Movie

Like any movie, plenty of scenes were filmed for Bad Trip that didn't make the final cut. One such scene depicted Andre's character getting an exorcism from an actual preacher .

Andre says that, in the end, it didn't "fit the body of the movie" and, indeed, the prank sounds pretty dark. After staying in a motel that is reportedly haunted, Andre pretended to become possessed by a demon spirit, and Howery commissioned a preacher to exorcise the demon. The prank involved levitation, bleeding walls, flickering lights, and even cockroaches emerging from a painting.

NEXT: The Eric Andre Show: The 10 Most Awkward Celebrity Interviews  

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

This mix of a scripted buddy comedy road movie and a real hidden camera prank show follows the outrageous misadventures of two buds stuck in a rut who embark on a cross-country road trip to ... Read all This mix of a scripted buddy comedy road movie and a real hidden camera prank show follows the outrageous misadventures of two buds stuck in a rut who embark on a cross-country road trip to NYC. The storyline sets up shocking real pranks. This mix of a scripted buddy comedy road movie and a real hidden camera prank show follows the outrageous misadventures of two buds stuck in a rut who embark on a cross-country road trip to NYC. The storyline sets up shocking real pranks.

• Kitao Sakurai
• Andrew Barchilon
• Michaela Conlin
• Lil Rel Howery
• 273 User reviews
• 57 Critic reviews
• 61 Metascore
• 1 nomination

• Chris Carey

• Trina Malone

• (as Cory Demeyers)

• Maria's Father

• (as Greg Smithaldridge)

• Joseph Stalin
• Ballroom Dancer
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Sacha Baron Cohen gave advice and input after he was shown an early cut of the film.
• Goofs A cameraman is clearly visible in the crowd during the puke scene in the Electric Cowboy bar.

Chris Carey : Chris Carey! From high school biology class! You know, Crazy Chris?

Maria Li : Um...

Chris Carey : Retard Chris?

Maria Li : Oh!

Chris Carey : Yeah! How the hell are you?

• Crazy credits The end credits show moments when extras in pivotal scenes find out that they were part of a film and that absurdity of what they just witnessed was not real. Also deleted scenes and alternate takes of certain scenes are shown throughout the remainder of the credits.
• Connections Featured in Half in the Bag: 2021 Movie Catch-Up (part 1 of 2) (2022)
• Soundtracks Soul on Top Written by Boca 45 (as Scott Hendy) & Louis Baker Performed by Boca 45 Courtesy of Mass Appeal Records

User reviews 273

• ElliotTharme
• Jun 21, 2020
• How long is Bad Trip? Powered by Alexa
• March 26, 2021 (United States)
• United States
• Netflix Site
• Chuyến Đi Siêu Quậy
• Georgia, USA
• Orion Pictures
• BRON Studios
• Creative Wealth Media Finance
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

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• Runtime 1 hour 26 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Movie Interviews

Eric andre's 'bad trip' is unlike a lot of prank comedies you might have seen.

Sam Sanders

Sam Sanders, host of NPR's It's Been A Minute , talks with comedian Eric Andre about making a prank movie while Black, pranking mostly people of color, and how it differs from, say, Johnny Knoxville.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

The comedian Eric Andre released a new film on Netflix last month. It's called "Bad Trip." It has hit No. 1 on the Netflix charts a few times since its release. "Bad Trip" is a buddy road trip film meets rom-com meets hidden camera prank show featuring Eric and the actors Tiffany Haddish and Lil Rel Howery. But unlike a lot of prank comedies you might have seen before, there is a big difference with this one. NPR's Sam Sanders spoke with Eric Andre about it on his podcast, It's Been A Minute, and we're going to share an excerpt of their chat here. Here's Sam.

SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: I spent a whole lot of time talking with Eric Andre about the nuts and bolts of making a prank film. How do you hide the cameras? Apparently in coffee cups. How do you lure unsuspecting people into the prank? Free food usually works. Were you ever scared for your safety? Yes, Eric Andre was, especially after someone pulled a knife on him during filming. You know, I asked all those questions, but I think I was most into talking with Eric about how this prank movie is different than most other prank films because here, most of the people on screen are Black.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

SANDERS: So talking about these pranks were knives are pulled, et cetera...

ERIC ANDRE: Yes.

SANDERS: ...Did you have to have any extra safety precautions around the potential for those things? Because you - y'all aren't Johnny Knoxville. Y'all are Black people out in the world doing this stuff.

ANDRE: (Laughter) We - after the knife incident, we beefed up our security. We did have a security guard during that, but we leveled it up a lot after that...

SANDERS: OK.

ANDRE: ...Because that was a nightmare. So...

SANDERS: Yeah.

ANDRE: ...Yeah. And my safe word was popcorn, but I kept forgetting my safe word in those violent moments.

SANDERS: (Laughter).

ANDRE: I kept saying goose bumps for some reason. My mind just rerecorded goose bumps over popcorn. So I'd be yelling at security, goose bumps, goose bumps, goose bumps. And they'd be like, huh? And I'd go [expletive] popcorn.

SANDERS: (Laughter) Dude. Do you think it was riskier doing the pranks that you're doing with a team of people of color as opposed to, like, literally Johnny Knoxville and the white folks doing it?

ANDRE: Yeah. It can be. I mean - you know, it's funny. I even talked to Knoxville about this. Knoxville had a prank that he did back in the day in "Jackass" where he was in an orange prison jumpsuit with handcuffs and legcuffs, and he went into a hardware store. And he was like, can you saw these handcuffs off of me? What do you got? And cops came and, like, almost arrested him. And I was just like thinking like, yeah, if me and Rel did that [expletive], we'd be dead. (Unintelligible, laughter).

SANDERS: You'd be dead. They would shoot you on sight. They would shoot you on sight.

ANDRE: Shoot me on sight.

So there was things like that where it was like - I mean, we had Tiffany in an orange jumpsuit. But you know what? That was a very contained - like, except for the graffiti removal guy, we locked down the street for her own safety.

SANDERS: Oh, really?

ANDRE: So we weren't letting, like, pedestrians on that street. We, like, kind of trapped that, unbeknownst to him.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BAD TRIP")

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) Better take your ass off. You better take off. You better [expletive]. You better run.

TIFFANY HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Man, I'm going to get my car, and I'm going to go to Mexico. And I'm going to just start all over, man.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) Get those clothes off, and get the [expletive] out of here.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Can I borrow your vest?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) I can't give you my vest.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) You my lookout. I never forget a face.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (As self) Go.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Thank you for helping me escape.

ANDRE: Hidden camera means...

SANDERS: That poor guy.

ANDRE: Hidden camera means hidden crew, so we kind of, like, isolated that guy without his knowledge so that Tiffany would be safe in the orange jumpsuit.

SANDERS: I love that guy.

ANDRE: Yeah.

SANDERS: He was a frickin' good sport.

ANDRE: Oh, my God. He's amazing.

SANDERS: On top of, like, the team doing these pranks being Black and brown, I noticed a lot of the, like, civilians and bystanders involved and on the sidelines and wrapped up in these pranks, they're also people of color.

SANDERS: Was that intentional?

ANDRE: Not directly intentional. A lot of - we filmed the majority of the movie in Atlanta, you know, and around Georgia.

SANDERS: Well, that explains a lot.

ANDRE: So there's just a lot of Black people in Atlanta. But also, it's a Black cast in compromised situations - our characters are always in compromised situations, and it was just nice seeing Black people help Black people out. It was like the...

ANDRE: ...People we were pranking were, like, even more invested because me and Rel are in peril in so many situations. And also, like, Black people have better reactions. Like, Black people are so emphatic. And, like, a lot of people in the movie like, wear their heart on their sleeve in the way, like, they don't hide their feelings. Like, some like...

SANDERS: No.

ANDRE: Like, if you prank, like, a white businessman, they just kind of like, well, that's weird. I'm just going to walk away. You know what I mean? Versus the women...

SANDERS: Whereas the Black woman starts praying for you...

ANDRE: Yes.

SANDERS: ...Literally.

ANDRE: Or the woman in the chicken wing shop, J.R. Crickets, that's like...

SANDERS: Love her.

ANDRE: ...When Tiffany comes in...

SANDERS: The short-haired woman?

ANDRE: Yeah, yeah. Jackie (ph) was her name.

SANDERS: She's amazing.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Hey, did you see these dudes? Did they come up in here 'cause you know they love chicken.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (As self) Oh, girl, you just missed them.

JACKIE: (As self) You just missed them.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Them [expletive] was here?

JACKIE: (As self) I was about to call you.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) Did anybody here see where these [expletive] went?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (As self) They went that way. They got in the car and went that way.

HADDISH: (As Trina Malone) I'm going to [expletive] these up.

JACKIE: (As self) Go get them, girl.

(CROSSTALK)

SANDERS: Yeah, I love Jackie.

ANDRE: And she's like, I was just about to call you, girl, when Tiffany came back.

ANDRE: She's like, I went to school with the police. I'm in security. I don't forget a face.

ANDRE: Like, she's just so charismatic. Like, if she was a stuffy white businessman who's like - works for a hedge fund, I don't think we would gotten that same reaction we got there (laughter).

SANDERS: Yeah, yeah. And, like, there's also - when you're getting those kind of reactions from people of color, it's also revealing something that I never saw a lot of in "Punk'd" or "Jackass" or even "Borat." And lots of reviewers have spoken about this in the film "Bad Trip." There's a certain humanity that's revealed...

SANDERS: ...In these people that are being pranked.

SANDERS: They are usually nice. They're usually kind. And they're trying to help in spite of them being totally discombobulated by the prank.

ANDRE: Totally. You know what? When we first showed the movie to Sacha Baron Cohen, he had the best, like, succinct, astute review. And he turned to me, and he goes, you know, my movies are about exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of, like, wealthy white oligarchs. He goes, your movie is about showing the humanity and the beauty and the good Samaritan nature of Black people and working-class people. And like, he goes, I really hope your movie, like, unites the working class because we're pitted against each other so often through class and race that your movie shows the humanity of the proletariat. And I was like, wow. Like, right at the end of the movie, like, that was the first thing out of his mouth.

SANDERS: You can see Eric Andre's "Bad Trip" on Netflix right now. Trust me; it'll surprise you in a good way.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KELLY: That was NPR's Sam Sanders having a lot of fun talking with comedian Eric Andre. You can hear more of their chat on Sam's podcast. It's called It's Been A Minute From NPR.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Here's How 'Bad Trip's Filmmakers Pulled off the Movie's Crazy Pranks

Mar. 29 2021, Updated 5:31 p.m. ET

Looking for a new laugh-out-loud comedy? 

Netflix 's latest film, Bad Trip , follows Eric André and Lil Rel Howery, who play best friends Chris and Bud, as they embark on a cross-country road trip. However, this comedy is not scripted and is instead filled with hilarious pranks and very real reactions from innocent bystanders.

So, how did the filmmakers and actors of Bad Trip pull off these outlandish pranks? Keep reading to find out more about how the film captured real reactions from people standing nearby. 

Yes, 'Bad Trip' is real! Here's how the Netflix movie pulled off its crazy stunts.

From the creators of Jackass, this hidden-camera film is filled with hilarious (yet raunchy) pranks and hijinks that only the actors are clued in on. So, how did they pull this wild movie off?

"It's a fascinating process, figuring out how to do something that seems crazy impossible," director Kitao Sakurai told USA Today . "But using tricks and sleight-of-hand, you realize that it's actually crazy, but possible."

In one scene, Chris (played by Eric) gets extremely drunk and falls about 15 feet while at the Electric Cowboy bar in Kennesaw, Ga. To prepare for this stunt, the actor practiced the fall the day prior, and fell into folded boxes with padding hidden underneath so he wouldn't get hurt.

"I did it over and over, so that it looked fluid when it was real," he told USA Today . Additionally, a crew member posed as a bar patron and very covertly fixed a tube that was attached to Eric's body, which allowed him to (fake) projectile-vomit on cue. A lovely combo of pea soup and vegetables was used.

'Bad Trip' star Tiffany Haddish tricked a city worker into thinking she had really escaped from prison.

There's no denying that Tiffany Haddish is one very funny individual. The actress stars in Bad Trip as Bud's sister Trina, who escapes from prison. 

The scene in which Tiffany is spotted escaping from the prison bus garnered one of the best reactions from a clueless bystander. 

“A guy is cleaning graffiti off a wall as this prison bus pulls up. The guard gets out, walks past him, and all of a sudden Tiffany drops out of the bottom of the bus and starts talking to the guy," producer Jeff Tremaine explained to Decider . "And the guy, looking out for her, tells her, ‘You gotta go. You gotta get out of here.’ I had no idea that she would be so good at the hidden camera game. She’s just a natural at taking people for a ride.”  

The bouncer in Netflix's 'Bad Trip' was not happy with filmmakers.

Though the innocent bystanders were not aware that they were being captured on hidden cameras at the time of their scenes, they eventually had to sign a release form after the gag, so filmmakers could use them in footage.

However, Eric revealed that some people had to be persuaded. 

During the scene when Chris (aka Eric) attempts to enter a Los Angeles art gallery party hosted by Maria (Michaela Conlin), he's denied entry by the bouncer several times.

The bouncer had been given very strict instructions not to let anyone enter the event unless they were on the list. But he eventually allows Chris inside after being told that he's trying to get ahold of his true love.

After finding out that he was part of a prank, the bouncer was not happy. "He had a long, seething moment," Eric revealed, adding that he needed to convince the man to sign a release form to use the scene in the movie. "We really had to massage his emotions after the prank to get him to sign. But he did."

Bad Trip is now streaming on Netflix.

'Bad Trip' Probably Wouldn't Have Worked if It Had All Been Filmed in One Place

Tiffany Haddish and Nicki Minaj Are Still Fighting Years After Their Feud Began

Tiffany Haddish Might Be About to Leave 'The Last O.G.'

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‘Bad Trip’ Review: Tiffany Haddish Steals the Show in Eric Andre’s Goofy Hidden Camera Romp

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It only takes Eric André a couple of minutes to get naked in “ Bad Trip ,” and another half hour before he’s sodomized by a gorilla, which should give you a sense of how quickly this goofy hidden camera romp careens from zero to crazy and just keeps going. In director Kitao Sakurai’s quasi-scripted comedy, the comedian plays a klutzy reprobate who drives from Miami to New York in search of his high school crush, but the flimsy plot is little more than an excuse for André to screw with people up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

Anyone familiar with André’s aggressive ability to push people into cringe-inducing circumstances will find plenty of that anarchic spirit on display here, usually outpacing the story around it. But it’s also given proper context: André’s devious style and wit is matched by a bumbling turn by Lil Rel Howery as his best pal, and even upstaged by a muscular Tiffany Haddish, as Howery’s sister and an escaped convict, who’s constantly on their tail. Together, the trio shows so much investment in the hidden camera concept that the entertainment factor often comes from simply watching them pull it off time and again.

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For the past decade, André’s vulgar prank-art has split the difference between “Jackass” and Sacha Baron Cohen, merging the zany physicality of the former with the sociological insight of the latter — though André’s less invested in bringing out the biases of his victims than simply using their shock as a distended punchline. Unlike the trippy Adult Swim excursions of “The Eric André Show,” however, “Bad Trip” forces André’s rascally in-your-face style into a jovial road trip formula that can’t help feeling less ambitious or satisfying than the stunts along the way.

The script, credited to André and Sakurai along with a few of their “Eric André Show” writers, seems pat enough: André plays Chris, a know-nothing troublemaker who veers from one job after the next, growing weary of the monotony as he tells his longtime pal Bud (Howery) that better times lie ahead. Of course, they don’t, and that’s just enough motivation for the pair to finally break free of their surroundings.

“Bad Trip” rises and falls on the basis of its gags, but they’re usually variations of the same formula. The movie essentially repeats one early stunt twice: Chris first sees old teen obsession Maria (Michaela Conlin) at an auto shop, where a mishap with a vacuum cleaner leaves him nude and cowering in a customer’s vehicle; next, she spots him behind the counter of a juice bar, where he accidentally mutilates his hand. In both cases, the actress enters and exits the scene without acknowledging the insanity on display, while André brilliantly coaxes random onlookers into playing a part in the scene.

All of that builds to a hilarious outdoor musical number in which André recognizes his need to find Maria back in New York, while more baffled people inadvertently become part of his show. Unlike “Borat” or “Bad Grandpa,” André isn’t presenting people with a cartoonish caricature. Instead, it’s the utter blandness of Chris that makes his unusual behavior so shocking — he’s an ordinary guy untethered from the common sense of the world around him, and it’s always hilarious to watch as he goads people into providing the reaction shots he needs to punctuate each joke.

In any case, “Bad Trip” ambles along, with Chris and Bud finally hitting the road in the hot-pink car owned by Bud’s sister Trina (Haddish) while she’s locked up. Equipped with a “Bad Bitch” license plate, the vehicle seems like an extension of Trina’s irascible persona. (“It’s like Pepto Bismol — it fixes anything!” she says. “Even though I like to drink Pepsi Bismol with a little Hennesy.”) When Trina sneaks away from her prison transport (freaking out a random guy on the sidewalk, of course), the movie instantly belongs to Haddish, in her most outright satisfying and ludicrous turn since she stole the show with “Girls Trip.” In this case, “Bad Trip” doesn’t get much better than the image of Trina flipping the bird from stolen police car after ripping off its driver’s seat door.

But it does get more familiar, with Chris and Bud enduring accidental drug trips, bar fights, and various other complications as they work their way toward New York, which arrives with a series of naturally chaotic showdowns. By the time they get to the aforementioned gorilla, some viewers may feel as though they got the basic idea. But there’s a certain wily energy that surrounds even the most ludicrous scenes, the sense that André and his cohorts are so invested in reigniting lowball comedy that they’re willing to put their actual lives on the line to earn the laughs.

The credits of “Bad Trip” do a victory lap on the whole routine, peeking behind the scenes as André and others reveal the candid cameras to their unwitting supporting players. Unlike Baron Cohen’s work, André seems to invite his targets to crack up with him, and they’re more than happy to oblige. “Bad Trip” is an extension of that all-inclusive approach: It’s a blunt instrument of absurdity, but that’s also what makes it so much fun.

“Bad Trip” is now streaming on Netflix .

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‘Bad Trip’ Review: Eric Andre’s Raunchy, Riotous Prank Terrorizes America

A shock-and-awe prank film that transplants rom-com hijinks into reality.

By Amy Nicholson

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It’s a romantic comedy cliché: Boy goes on outrageous quest to win back the girl of his dreams, an adventure fueled by derring-do and impassioned speeches that gain urgency as the violins swell. Onscreen, those manic you-complete-me moments make audiences swoon. But in reality, they’d look like “Bad Trip,” a squirm-worthy exercise in vicarious humiliation that welds the rom-com formula to a gross-out prank show. Directed by Kitao Sakurai and produced by “Jackass” co-creator Jeff Tremaine, “Bad Trip” hands lovelorn loser Chris ( Eric Andre , who co-wrote the film with Sakurai and Dan Curry) a safe word (“popcorn”) and the keys to a hot pink Crown Victoria, and sets the comedian loose to terrorize unsuspecting bystanders along a northbound interstate from Florida to Manhattan, where he intends to profess his love to his middle school crush Maria (Michaela Conlin of “Bones”).

Riding shotgun is Lil Rey Howery as Chris’ best friend Bud, and on their trail storms a terrifyingly incognito Tiffany Haddish , tatted and volatile, posing as Bud’s older sister Trina, a sociopathic prison escapee who barges into restaurants brandishing Chris and Bud’s picture and convinces strangers they might have to testify in a murder trial. Will these good citizens rat out Andre’s besotted Chris, who drips pathos like a leaking hose, and the charmingly sincere Howery? Alas, the average civilian lacks the courage of a movie hero. Groans one man, “I wasn’t ready to be Samuel L. Jackson in ‘The Negotiator.’”

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The result is sniggering slapstick that’s two-parts biological fluids and one-part salute to the innate empathy of mankind, often in the same scene. Take the zoo tour where Chris attempts to impress Maria by sneaking into the cage of an amorous gorilla for a selfie. The scene quickly becomes repellant for reasons better left to the imagination. Yet his fellow tourists’ concern adds a dash of sugar, even if their advice is merely untested hunches (“Don’t look him in the eye!”) or relationship insights (“Would she go out there for you?”) that could wait until Chris has pulled up his pants. Not everyone is so kind. When Andre and Howery barge into a barbershop with their unmentionables conjoined in a Chinese finger trap, a knife-wielding man chases them down the street. (Afterwards, Howery nearly quit.)

“Bad Trip” is an extension of Andre and Sakurai’s eight-year creative partnership on Adult Swim’s “The Eric Andre Show,” five seasons of aggressive performance art disguised as a talk show. Andre disables the part of his amygdala that restrains him from holding strangers’ babies until they cry or unnerving guests with cockroaches and jump scares. The goal of his stunts isn’t to make his patsies angry. It’s to make them feel as though reality has cracked open under their feet, to tectonically upend normal codes of behavior so that even the audience is unsettled by their own laughter. Is it funny when Haddish pretends to break out of a police van and pressures a witness to lie to the cops? Yes and no. But while it’s possible to have empathy for an individual, in the aggregate, the movie’s marks become hilarious carnage.

Sakurai’s favorite hidden camera closeups aren’t of people snarling in anger (though there’s plenty of that). It’s of someone slack-jawed that they’d entered someplace benign — a juice bar, a car wash, a grocery store — only to suddenly bear witness to Andre’s extreme joy or shame. His Chris suffers the emotional equivalent of Johnny Knoxville shooting himself out of a cannon. When Chris asks a random guy on a bench if he should surprise Maria in New York, the man advises him to go for it. When Chris leaps up and starts to sing, the now-invested stranger grins, “He’s in love!” But when Chris jazz-dances into a mall food court, a shopper kicks in panic. Someone that happy has got to be dangerous.

However, Andre’s social experiments prove that the majority of Americans truly want to be helpful. This makes the film oddly heartening, whether from an Army recruitment officer who gives Chris a needed boost, or from a diner waitress who edits the sex out of a draft of Chris’ climactic profession of love. “Be more romantic,” she advises. How long? At least “30 minutes to an hour.” As the end credits roll, “Bad Trip” plays a montage of people learning they’ve been pranked, which eases the psychic damage. That the pranksters are the most imperiled by their hoaxes offers a bruising absolution. Still, as Haddish barges up to a policeman to ask him for a kiss, it’s hard not to pray: It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie.

Reviewed online, Los Angeles, March 24, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 84 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of an Orion Pictures production. Producers: Jeff Tremaine, Eric Andre, David Bernard, Ruben Fleischer. Co-producers: Dan Curry, Kevin Costello. Executive producers: Aaron L. Gilbert, Shanna Zablow Newton, Jason Cloth.
• Crew: Director: Kitao Sakurai. Screenplay: Sakurai, Eric Andre, Dan Curry. Camera: Andrew Laboy. Editors: Sascha Stanton Craven, Matthew Kosinski, Caleb Swyers. Music: Ludwig Göransson, Joseph Shirley.
• With: Eric Andre, Lil Rel Howery, Tiffany Haddish, Michaela Conlin.

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Netflix’s Bad Trip Might Help You Feel Better About Our Broken Nation

It might not be entirely accurate to call the new Eric Andre film Bad Trip a prank comedy, since prank comedies often turn on making unsuspecting people look like idiots. Punk’d , for example, was all about putting unaware celebrities into situations where they would (hopefully) act like dolts or hypocrites for all the world to see. Da Ali G Show often did the same with politicians, and the Borat movies, of course, do it with the entire United States of America. Even the uncontrollably nutty prank segments on The Eric Andre Show generally require more activity on the part of the ordinary citizens that have wandered in front of its hidden cameras. They are, for all intents and purposes, still the subjects of the gags in question.

Bad Trip , however, doesn’t really take aim at its unwitting bystanders. More often than not, the movie is a closed circuit of idiocy, whereby the actual actors act like buffoons with each other, leaving everyone else — all the real people, as it were — to just observe and react (or, in some cases, not). And weirdly, it’s refreshingly free of cynicism. Most of the bystanders in the film seem to be helpful, tolerant, sensible — which seems downright shocking at a moment in time when we’ve all been told that we hate each other’s guts. Bad Trip might be a dumb, gross candid-camera comedy, but don’t be surprised if it makes you feel a little better about your world.

It’s also absurdly funny, though it’s not quite absurd ist , unlike the genuinely bizarre, did-I-dream-that heights of Andre’s ruthlessly inventive Adult Swim show, with which it shares a creative team, including director Kitao Sakurai. (This film was produced by Jackass ’ Jeff Tremaine, who admittedly did something similar with the surprisingly heartwarming Johnny Knoxville stunt-comedy Bad Grandpa eight years ago.) Bad Trip ’s brand of comedy accelerates between standard slow-burn humiliation and outright gross-out shock, but the fact that it’s all happening out in public, in front of all to see, lends the proceedings an electric unpredictability.

You can see this very early on, as Chris (Andre), working at a carwash, awkwardly takes a customer into his confidence about how another customer who just arrived, Maria (Michaela Conlin), was the girl he had a crush on in high school. He tells the man he’s still desperately in love with Maria and determined to finally ask her out. Then, suddenly, all of Chris’s clothes are sucked off his body by an overzealous vacuum cleaner, and the poor customer is forced to ask Maria for her phone number, all while an extremely naked Chris hides in one of the cars and eggs him on. The cringe comedy tenderizes us for the bigger, broader gags, and vice versa. It’s not sophisticated stuff (especially compared to the gonzo hidden camera gags on The Eric Andre Show , with its surreal, delirious, complex pranks built within other pranks), but there’s a method to it.

The story, such as it is, is so thin it’s practically translucent. Still dreaming about Maria, who curates a gallery in New York, Chris convinces his best friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery) to go on a road trip from Florida to New York. To do so, they take Bud’s sister Trina’s car, since she’s behind bars. Of course, Trina (Tiffany Haddish) escapes (with the conflicted aid of an unsuspecting mensch, whom she enlists in helping her get out from under the prison bus where she’s been hiding) and goes after our heroes with a vengeance. Along the way, everyone gets in a variety of scrapes: Chris has an unspeakable encounter with a gorilla at a zoo, while Trina hijacks a cop car by ripping off its door, all while everyone around them looks on in befuddled shock.

Sometimes, they’re more than shocked. At a bar where Chris gets blitzed and falls off a wall, an off-duty nurse in the crowd rushes to his aid. (He promptly projectile vomits all over her — but to her credit, she continues trying to assist him.) After Chris and Bud get in a seemingly horrific car wreck and then bicker with one another, eyewitnesses intervene and try to de-escalate the situation. When a distraught Chris goes to an Army recruiting stand and tells the soldier he wants to enlist because he wants to die, the man actually tries to talk him down. Late in the film, as Trina hangs Chris off the roof of a building and threatens to throw him over, a group of people at street-level try to negotiate with her. In contrast to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat Sagdiyev, who tends to lead with his contempt (with admittedly often glorious and surprising results ), wherever Chris, Bud, and Trina go, they find their fellow Americans not just willing to help them out, but often knowing how to do so. (An unspoken but poignant thread running through the picture is the suggestion that these anonymous bystanders might have found themselves in similarly extreme situations before, for far less entertaining reasons.)

Though Bad Trip is a loose, often shapeless movie, its focus on the common humanity of those caught by its lenses is certainly a choice on the part of the filmmakers. It wouldn’t have been hard to accelerate these situations to the point where everyone began to act like jerks, and one presumes plenty of stuff has been cut out. (We do see some outtakes over the end credits, along with footage of people learning that they’ve been on camera all this time.) I don’t want to oversell Bad Trip — if it doesn’t make you laugh, chances are it will annoy the shit out of you — but its generosity toward our fellow humans can, at times, be genuinely moving.

• movie review
• lil rel howery
• tiffany haddish
• jeff tremaine
• hidden camera
• kitao sakurai
• 2021 movies

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With ingeniously gross hidden-camera bits that often find their unsuspecting marks at their best, Bad Trip turns out to be a surprisingly uplifting ride.

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‘Bad Trip’ Review: On the Road, Leaking Fluid

Two pranksters, and a brace of hidden cameras, travel across country in this jauntily gross comedy.

• Share full article

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Strictly for devotees of degrading pranks and public humiliation, Kitao Sakurai’s “Bad Trip” — a “Jackass”-style road movie belching clouds of poor taste — follows two hapless dreamers from Florida to New York City.

Strapping squalid stunts on the back of a dopey narrative, this hidden-camera Netflix comedy sends Chris (Eric Andre, of the supremely weird “The Eric Andre Show” ) and his friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery) on a cross-country quest for romance. Chris has learned that his onetime high-school crush (Michaela Conlin) is working in a Manhattan art gallery, and he plans to declare his still-fervent devotion.

Contrasting the starry-eyed innocence of this goal with the pair’s repellent misadventures en route, the screenplay (by Andre, Sakurai and Dan Curry) concentrates on bathing its leads in as many noxious emissions as possible. Fake vomit, urine and gorilla ejaculate squirt across the screen as our heroes horrify the unsuspecting patrons of a cowboy bar and a zoo, exemplifying pranks queasily fixated on orificial and genital abuse. Bud’s wrathful sister (Tiffany Haddish), whose beloved car the two have pinched, might be murderously in pursuit, but she can take her time: Her prey won’t get very far with their penises stuck in a Chinese finger trap.

However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone. An end-credits reveal of the hidden cameras to the film’s good-natured dupes has a humorous purity that’s unexpected and appealing — if far too late to mitigate the dreck that has gone before.

Bad Trip Rated R. Did I mention the gorilla ejaculate? Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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Film / Bad Trip

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Bad Trip is a 2021 Buddy Picture comedy film heavily influenced by Dumb and Dumber and Borat , directed by Kitao Sakurai and starring Eric André , Lil Rel Howery , Tiffany Haddish , and Michaela Conlin .

In pursuit of his high school crush Maria (Conlin), Chris (Andre) takes his best friend Bud (Howery) on a road trip from their small Florida town to New York City in Bud's felon sister Trina (Haddish)'s car. However, Trina has just escaped from jail and pursues them all the way in revenge for taking her car.

In addition to the plot, the film is also a hidden camera show , with extras being unaware that they were shooting for a film and finding out afterwards.

This film provides examples of:

• Chris accidentally sticks his hand in a blender similar to a prank done on The Eric Andre Show .
• There is also a scene where an art gallery is destroyed and Andre’s character drinks window cleaner, just like two other pranks on the show.
• He also tries to get enlisted in the army by asking the recruiting soldier if he could suck his dick.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other : When Bud stands up to Trina at the end, she gives him a hug and tells him that she's proud of him for showing some balls.
• Because You Were Nice to Me : Why Chris is enamored with Maria; he was bullied in school and she was the only one who defended him.
• Bestiality Is Depraved : When Chris tries to get a selfie with a gorilla (obviously a guy in a suit), the gorilla sexually assaults him in multiple ways in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers.
• Beware the Nice Ones : Maria is surprisingly chill when Chris comes over in her art gallery and professes his love to her, but after Trina crashes a stolen police car into her gallery and starts to destroy everything while trying to beat up Chris, she goes ballistic on Chris when he comes to say goodbye, yelling at him to get the fuck out .
• Big Applesauce : Chris and Bud’s destination, where Chris’ love interest, Maria Li, is hosting an art show.
• Big Bad : Bud's sister Trina is the closest thing the movie has to one, following Chris and Bud throughout their road trip and intending to beat the crap out of them for stealing her car.
• Big Sister Bully : Trina has bullied and intimidated Bud throughout his life, even robbing him at his own workplace - until he stands up to her at the end.

• Butt-Monkey : Chris and Bud; Chris undergoes several physical traumas throughout the movie, including cutting up his hand in a blender, falling on a decorative hut while drunk and vomiting everywhere, getting raped by a gorilla , and being dangled from a building by his shirt; this is mostly because he keeps doing impulsive and stupid shit. Bud is bullied by his thuggish sister, Trina, and keeps getting dragged into Chris’ bullshit because he’s too weak-willed to stand up for himself, at least until the near end of movie, where he calls out both of them.
• Candid Camera Prank : The movie is full of these, but unlike in Borat , the unsuspecting movie extras aren't the butt of the jokes, and most of them thought it was Actually Pretty Funny when they found out what was going on.
• Charles Atlas Superpower : Trina is freakishly strong, being able to rip off a car door and hang Chris off a building. According to Bud, she once fried a fish using the warmth of her hand.
• Covers Always Lie : One of the posters depicts Chris and Bud (in their work uniforms) sitting on top of a crashed Bad Bitch on fire in the middle of a country side happily eating ice cream. In the actual film, they crash in a street near Baltimore, bitterly break off their friendship, and only get ice cream after they reconciled and get to New York. Plus, they’re wearing their normal clothes throughout the trip.
• Dance Party Ending : When they crash a party in the Hamptons dressed as white people, Chris, Bud, and Trina make the DJ play, then dance to the DMX song “Party Up” as the credits roll.
• Despair Event Horizon : After accidentally crashing the Bad Bitch, Chris and Bud part ways and Chris, in a deep depression, tries to get enlisted in the army just so that he can get placed in the front lines and get killed.
• Did Not Get the Girl : The whole trip turns turns out to be for naught after Maria reveals that she isn’t interested in Chris, and then after Trina ruins her art show, she burns bridges with Chris out of rage .
• Did Not Think This Through : The reason why Chris keeps getting in trouble throughout the movie.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones : Trina, despite her bullying of Bud, reveals that it was partly done so that she could toughen him up. She also loved her deceased grandmother, who have gave her the Bad Bitch.
• Every Car Is a Pinto : Downplayed, but some flames burst out from the Bad Bitch after it crashes.
• Excuse Plot : Chris goes on a cross-country road trip to confess to the girl of his dreams, all while being pursued by Bud's psycho older sister. The plot basically exists entirely in service of the pranks.
• From Bad to Worse : When Chris finally meets Maria in New York, he professes his love for her only for her to reject him, since she barely knows him aside from limited interactions in high school. Then, she ends wanting nothing to do with him after his trip to meet her accidentally leads to Trina destroying her art gallery when she tries to kill Chris .
• Also, Chris is grabbed by the balls by Trina when she finds and tries to kill him.
• Identical Stranger : After a fight with Bud, Chris starts stopping guys that look like him, mistaking them for Bud.
• Meaningful Name : Bud's primary narrative role is to be Chris' loyal best friend; in other words, his bud.
• Mushroom Samba : Chris finds what he thinks are mints in the glovebox of the car, that turn out to be some kind of hallucinogen. A wild drug trip ensues that consists mostly of wild shenanigans in a supermarket, and ends with Chris and Bud getting their penises stuck in the Chinese finger trap. It Makes As Much Sense In Context .
• Naked People Are Funny : In the opening scene, Chris accidentally gets his coveralls sucked off by an industrial strength vacuum cleaner.
• Nice to the Waiter : When Chris is rushing to work at the beginning of the movie and causing all sorts of collateral damage, he still manages to establish himself as a fundamentally well-meaning guy by stopping what he's doing to help an old lady load groceries into her car and holding the door for another woman.
• Pet the Dog : Chris helps an old woman putting groceries in her car while running late for work.
• Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure : Chris and Bud fight with each other after Chris crashes Trina’s car when Bud finds out that Trina is going after them and Chris tries to stop him by grabbing onto the wheel.
• The Precious, Precious Car : The Bad Bitch, Trina’s customized, pink Ford Crown Victoria that was a gift from her grandma. Unfortunately for her (as well as Bud and Chris), it gets wrecked when Chris tries to stop the car when Bud tries to back out of the trip.
• Road Trip Plot : Chris and Bud are road tripping from Florida to New York to visit Chris' high school crush.
• While driving, Chris has an Imagine Spot about Maria that is very similar to Lloyd's fantasy about Mary. It even ends with him almost hitting a semi head-on. All that's missing is "I Love the Flower Girl" by The Cowsills.
• After a major setback, Chris and Bud have a falling out and Bud decides to go home, only for Chris to catch up to him and reconcile.
• The movie ends with Chris, Bud, and Trina at the Hamptons Disguised in Drag (and whiteface) in an outright stated shout-out to White Chicks .
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here : After hearing that Trina is looking for them, Bud attempts to go back home, only for Chris to grab the wheel— and crash into two cars and flip over.
• So Proud of You : When Bud stands up to Trina when she tries to drop Chris off a building, she’s so proud that she hugs and (mostly) forgives him for wrecking her car.
• Tempting Fate : When trying to convince Bud to use his sister’s car to help Chris see Maria, Chris brings up that Trina’s in jail and that she’s never getting out. Cue a scene where Trina escapes prison by hiding under a bus.
• Time Skip : The opening is set one year before the events of the movie. In it, Chris tries to talk to Maria who happened to stop by at the auto detailing place where he worked, only to miss his chance due to an accident with a vacuum cleaner stripping him naked, forcing him to hide. The prologue also reveals how Trina got arrested, which is because she robbed Bud’s workplace and took off her house arrest tracker.
• Underside Ride : How Trina escaped prison.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend : In his dream of dating Maria, Chris imagines that another man flirts with her on a date, and she beats the shit out of him, clearly turned on at the spectacle.
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Common sense media reviewers.

Funny but crass hidden-camera prank comedy; drugs, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Friends stick by each other through thick and thin

Trina bullies her brother, steals, escapes from pr

Chris and Bud suffer all kinds of "accidents" play

Discussion about sexual acts and nudity includes a

"F--k," the "N" word, versions of "s--t" and "ass,

The movie White Chicks, BMW, VW, Chevrolet, Pepto

Adults smoke cigarettes and vape, and Chris and Bu

Parents need to know that Bad Trip , a hidden-camera road trip comedy starring Eric Andre, Lil Rel Howery, and Tiffany Haddish, has language, nudity, sexual references, and violence that make it appropriate only for older teens. The film combines a scripted story involving an impromptu road trip with hidden…

Positive Messages

Friends stick by each other through thick and thin. You can learn from unrequited love. Sometimes it's important to follow your dreams.

Positive Role Models

Trina bullies her brother, steals, escapes from prison, and threatens and intimidates people, but she also cares about her brother and wants him to be strong. Chris and Bud steal Trina's car and get into all kinds of trouble on a misguided road trip. They "accidentally" destroy property and scare innocent people, but they're devoted to each other and their friendship. They often behave like impulsive kids, but they generally seem to mean well and treat people kindly. Bystanders involved in this film also often act with genuine kindness. The film is mostly set in Black communities, and the characters are cognizant when they're the "only Black people" in a place. When they dress up as White people, they tell each other to "think White thoughts."

Violence & Scariness

Chris and Bud suffer all kinds of "accidents" played as real to shock bystanders. These include getting a hand stuck in a blender, falling from heights, flipping a car, crashing through a glass door, and being raped by a gorilla, threatened with a knife, doused with gasoline, hit with a golf club, and electrocuted by car jacks. They get sprayed with gorilla semen, Porta Potty poop, and chunky vomit. In one scene, Chris suggests he wants to kill himself and offers to sign up for the military and go to the front lines of Iraq or Afghanistan. Trina threatens to kill Bud and Chris for stealing her car. She threatens multiple other people for snitching on her as she commits crimes like escaping prison and stealing a cop car. She hangs Chris off a tall building and steals money from Bud. Chris daydreams about an outing with Maria where they beat a blind man and steal his wallet.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Discussion about sexual acts and nudity includes a man's bare bottom and two penises stuck together and stretched out with a toy, and language like "make love," "condom," "cum," "jizz," "suck your d--k," "hairy p--sy," and having sex with different "genders and genres." Chris sees his high school crush and falls in love with her all over again. In a daydream, a priest makes out with the bride and groom after marrying them. Trina tells a cop he's "beautiful" and asks if she can kiss him.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k," the "N" word, versions of "s--t" and "ass," as well as "bitch," "damn," "hell," "suck," "crap," "c--ksucker," "d--k," "poop," "retard," "p--sy," "cum," "hell," "idiot," "nuts," "booty-hole," "pee," "piss," "fart," "Jesus," and a poster of a hand giving the middle finger.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The movie White Chicks , BMW, VW, Chevrolet, Pepto Bismol, Hennessy, Jack Daniels, Google Maps, Electric Cowboy, South of the Border, JR Crickets, Times Square, Kroger, and other stores seen in background.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults smoke cigarettes and vape, and Chris and Bud drink shots at a bar until Chris gets so drunk he vomits all over the place and other people. They take pills they find in Trina's car thinking they are mints and end up on a hallucinogenic drug trip, waking up in a compromising position without knowing how they got there.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Bad Trip , a hidden-camera road trip comedy starring Eric Andre , Lil Rel Howery , and Tiffany Haddish , has language, nudity, sexual references, and violence that make it appropriate only for older teens. The film combines a scripted story involving an impromptu road trip with hidden-camera pranks and scenes involving unsuspecting real-life people. Some of these pranks get violent or destructive: The point is to shock with "accidents" (only Howery and mostly Andre get "hurt") involving blood, semen, poop, accidental drug trips, drunken vomiting, and nudity (male behinds and parts of penises are shown). Sexual references include some explicit language. Characters swear profusely, including the "f--k," the "N" word, versions of "s--t," "ass," and more ("bitch," "damn," "hell," "suck," "crap," "c--ksucker," "d--k," "retard," "p--sy," "cum," and "hell," for example). The film is a buddy movie and the main characters learn how much they love and appreciate each other over the course of the action, and Howery's character comes to a new understanding of his relationship with his tough-as-nails sister (Haddish) as well. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (4)
• Kids say (7)

Based on 4 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Buddies Chris ( Eric Andre ) and Bud ( il Rel Howery ) are stuck in dead-end jobs living in the same Florida town where they went to high school at the start of BAD TRIP. When Chris runs into his high school crush, Maria Li ( Michaela Conlin ), he convinces Bud to drop everything and drive to New York City, where Maria lives, so he can declare his love for her. Lacking their own wheels, they decide to borrow Bud's sister Trina's ( Tiffany Haddish ) car. She's serving time in prison and won't miss it anyway -- or so they think. Soon after they take off on their road trip, Trina escapes from prison. When she discovers the boys have taken her car, she vows to hunt them down and get her car, or kill them in the process. Meanwhile, Bud and Chris will get into all kinds of trouble as they drive north from Florida.

Is It Any Good?

This film has several laugh-out-loud moments, many meant-to-shock sequences, and even some tender scenes of friendship between its two male leads. But like the Borat and Jackass films before it, Bad Trip will turn many audiences off with its over-the-top vulgarity, violence, and gross-out scenes, mostly involving bodily fluids (go ahead and imagine the worst because it's all here). The actors are all convincing in their roles: Howery as the sweet underdog Bud, Andre as the misguided but well-intentioned Chris, Conlin as love interest Maria, and especially Haddish as the hilariously unhinged bully Trina. A perennial comic tool, the male characters seem stuck in a prolonged adolescence. You can tell the cast and crew had a blast making this movie, but even if it's sometimes a fun ride, it definitely won't be for everyone.

The hidden-camera genre always offers some insights into human behavior. It's eye-opening to see how regular people react in completely abnormal circumstances, like a man getting raped by a gorilla, a woman escaping prison or threatening to throw a man off a building, and two men emerging from a spectacular car crash. Some speak out, others ignore what's going on, and some offer advice or assistance -- even in committing a crime. Most pull out their phones and begin filming. This movie is set primarily in Black neighborhoods and businesses up the Southeast corridor between Florida and New York except for some notable exceptions, like an all-White cowboy bar. A final, racially-tinged sequence is reminiscent of Borat at the Conservative Political Action Conference and pays homage to the Wayans brothers' 2004 movie White Chicks . Stick around for the end credits to see how some of the unsuspecting bystanders react when they're told they've been pranked.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the ethics behind films like Bad Trip , which involve unsuspecting bystanders in pranks and unscripted scenes. Do you think the people involved gave their consent to be included in the film? How do you know?

Do you think the film goes too far at any point in its vulgarity or antics? If so, when and why?

A man appears to help Trina escape from prison, and another suggests Bud not tell the police that the car he has just crashed is stolen. Do these men seem to be willing to aide in crimes? What do you make of this?

How does this film compare to other similar movies, like the Borat films or Jackass ?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : March 26, 2021
• Cast : Eric Andre , Tiffany Haddish , Lil Rel Howery
• Director : Kitao Sakurai
• Inclusion Information : Black actors, Female actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Comedy
• Topics : Friendship
• Run time : 84 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : crude sexual content, pervasive language, some graphic nudity and drug use
• Last updated : February 18, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Tom Brady accused of ruining collectibles with shoddy autograph at $3,600 event: 'It's horrible'

Seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady left collectors who paid $3,600 for his autograph disgruntled after they alleged his sloppy penmanship ruined pieces of treasured memorabilia.

"It's the same thing as being in a graveyard or cemetery and knocking over stones or defacing them," memorabilia collector Glenn Gagnon told USA TODAY. "That's what Brady did."

The former New England Patriots footballer was a guest speaker on Saturday at a conference for EXMA , a global marketing education platform, held at the University of Miami's Watsco Center, according to the company's website.

On the flyer for the event, EXMA promoted a photo and signature opportunity with the 46-year-old former pro athlete. The flyer also said the event included a three-hour yacht ride to view the Miami skyline, a VVIP party and a VIP lunch for attendees who paid for a $3,600 ticket. The additional events occurred throughout the weekend.

Gagnon and other memorabilia collectors paid for the pricey tickets. Gagnon, who lives in Methuen, Massachusetts, felt his items were "defaced" and "ruined" by Brady.

NFL DRAFT HUB: Latest NFL Draft mock drafts, news, live picks, grades and analysis.

USA TODAY contacted Brady's reps on Wednesday but did not receive a response.

Glenn Gagnon, son paid $18,000 for trip to EXMA conference

Gagnon, 58, and his 21-year-old son traveled to Miami together and paid $18,000 for the trip, including the cost of Brady's autographs.

"My son never met (Brady) and the whole nine yards," Gagnon said. "It's horrible, I'd rather have (Brady) reject the stuff."

The memorabilia Gagnon brought to the event included a seat back from Gillette Stadium designed for owner Robert Kraft in 2002, Brady's game-worn cleats from the 2018 NFL season and an unused book of New England Patriots tickets from the 2001-02 season he called "priceless" due to only two being in existence.

"These pieces were like the holy grail of my collection," Gagnon said. "... I've been collecting for 40 years. I am a diehard collector."

Gagnon said he did not see Brady sign the items, instead, he and other collectors waited while the retired quarterback went into a room with his reps and Fernando Anzures, EXMA's founder and CEO, to do the autographs.

'This is something like a 4-year-old did'

Gagnon said he's gotten free autographs from Brady at benefits and other free events, but after paying $3,600, he expected better.

"That's a free autograph, (so) that's the risk you take," the collector said. "There's no risk in what we did. Everything was going right, and then we get the stuff and it's like, 'What is this.' This is something like a 4-year-old did."

Beckett Collectibles rejected the signed memorabilia after Gagnon gave it to them for authentication, according to the collector.

Gagnon said he would have preferred a partial refund from EXMA to cover travel expenses.

'Simply inexcusable,' EXMA event attendee says

Greg Nazareth, another collector who attended the event, said Saturday in a Facebook post that what happened the day of the signing was "simply inexcusable."

"Now don’t get me wrong, Tom’s interview and talk was simply amazing….he exuded poise, cursed quite a bit making him feel like one of us, and was incredibly humble…if only that would have translated to what he did just an hour earlier when he signed our items," Nazareth's post said.

The items Nazareth brought in "probably totaled close to six figures in value, and were one of one items in totality," according to the Facebook post.

"All in all, I would have never paid $3,600 to receive the signature I got today on the items I brought," Nazareth said in the post.

Collector Brad Jarrett felt similarly to Nazareth and Gagnon, saying Monday in a Facebook post he still blames "Tom a lot for this." Jarret went to the event to have Brady's 2000 NFL Draft ticket signed, according to the post.

"Tom let his emotions get the best of him and didn’t hurt the promoters he hurt those of us who were there with items," Jarrett said in the post. "He could’ve easily refused to sign, he could’ve signed only items that matched what he was contracted to sign. What he didn’t have to do though was put squibbles on everyone’s items and ruin them, that was a choice Tom made and it was wrong and makes him just as accountable as the shady promoters of this event."

'I'm trying to fix it,' EXMA founder and CEO says

Fernando Anzures told USA TODAY on Wednesday that he's "not an expert" but he welcomed cooperating with fans of Brady who were displeased by the signing.

"If they were there, they are fans," EXMA's CEO said. "I'm going to do my best."

Anzures said he's "not the one signing" the autographs but wants to support the collectors' grievances in "any possible way." Anzures said the disgruntled collectors were a small portion of the 93 tickets he sold to the $3,600 event; about 80 of those attendees said they were "so happy" about how the weekend of events went.

The 2,400 people in attendance were "showing love to Tom Brady" because he helped deliver an "amazing and outstanding conference," according to Anzures.

Regarding refunds, Anzures said he did issue them for collectors who brought trading cards because Brady's contract with EXMA stipulated that the quarterback could deny signing certain items.

"I'm trying to fix it," Anzures said. "I don't know what is the solution because I don't know what is the problem, but I'm hoping to receive every phone call."

Once Anzures speaks to the concerned collectors and others unhappy about the signing, he plans to message the agency repping Brady to solve the problem.

"I'm trying to make this happen," Anzures said.