By Robert Scucci
| Published 21 seconds ago

Have you ever had to sit through those agonizingly boring training videos that Troy McClure was always celebrating on The Simpsons? Titles like Dig Your Own Grave and Save and Lead Paint: Delicious But Deadly come to mind when I think of the brilliant 2020 satire, Survival Skills. As somebody who loves found footage, analog horror, and the kind of creepy lost media amateur filmmakers upload to YouTube (looking at you, Indistinct Chatter!), Survival Skills feels like something else entirely. It’s a disturbing tale about a naive, idealistic police officer fresh out of the academy who just so happens to be the subject of a 1980s training film meant to teach viewers the dos and don’ts of the job.

The film thrives in this environment and quickly goes off the rails in the best possible way when our wide-eyed trainee decides he doesn’t want to stick to the script, irritating the narrator to no end as he scrambles to force a course correction that’s clearly out of his scope as a member of the academy’s training staff.

Jim Is So Naive It’s Precious

Survival Skills kicks off as your typical run-of-the-mill training video produced by Survival Solutions, Inc. We’re introduced to the narrator, portrayed by Stacy Keach, who gives us the rundown on how to be a good little police officer. He talks about the dangers of the job, proper protocol and etiquette, and how to diffuse the kinds of situations cops find themselves in when they start pounding the pavement with the intent of cleaning up the streets and keeping citizens safe.

Then we meet Jim (Vayu O’Donnell), who looks like he walked straight out of Leave It to Beaver. He’s so sickeningly optimistic that you almost don’t like him. He lives with his perfect girlfriend, Jenny, who packs his lunch with fresh jam every morning, and he carries a toy police cruiser with him everywhere because he’s just that innocent. When the narrator spins the wheel of potential house calls viewers need to prepare for, the training video throws Jim into a domestic disturbance on his first day, something he’s clearly not mentally equipped to handle.

During the call, Jim is disturbed by his older, more cynical partner Allison’s (Ericka Kreutz) lack of concern, but according to police protocol, she’s technically doing her job correctly. And she’s not wrong. They make the house call, everybody involved insists it was a misunderstanding, and Allison and Jim leave knowing they can’t legally do anything about Mark Jenning (Bradford Farwell), the abusive husband, or the way he treats his wife Leah (Emily Chisholm) and daughter Lauren (Madeline Anderson).

Here’s where the film gets interesting. Jim is rattled by the exchange and feels completely helpless. He wants to do right by his community and, more specifically, Leah and Lauren. The narrator watches the training tape in disgust as Jim keeps going off script, forcing him to rewind the tape and awkwardly reintroduce entire segments. Jim, the little Boy Scout that he is, keeps interfering with the escalating domestic situation, inadvertently destroying the family dynamic, his reputation, and his personal life in the process. His intentions are sincere, but he keeps breaking protocol, and his good intentions consistently make things worse for everybody involved.

Don’t Do What Donny Don’t Does

These days, it’s easy to say “All Cops Are Bastards” and assume anybody in uniform is a power-hungry monster waiting to ruin your life. Jim, on the other hand, is the real deal. All of his training tells him to use lethal force before properly sizing up a situation, and you can see him resisting that indoctrination with every fiber of his being. He genuinely wants to serve and protect, and whenever he tries to do exactly that, he’s advised against it. More often than not, he ignores that advice, usually with disastrous consequences.

You can see the toll these interactions take on Jim’s psyche as the second and third acts unfold. Slowly but surely, the light leaves his eyes. He becomes a cynical shell of his former self while the narrator completely loses his mind trying to fix a training tape that seems to have developed a life of its own.

Through Survival Solutions, Inc.’s training tape, we learn what’s truly at stake here, both in the film and in real life. Young men and women join the force hoping to make their communities safer. You have characters like Allison, who’s cynical but has accepted her role as somebody who simply goes through the motions because she knows criminals and abusers will always exercise their own free will, and there’s simply too much bureaucratic red tape involved to actually make a difference. Jim is constantly at odds with her because he sees the entire system as fundamentally broken and he wants to change it. In fact, the system is so broken that it ultimately breaks him in the worst possible way, while a horrified narrator takes swigs of brown liquor and slowly realizes he’s part of the problem.

Survival Skills is unlike any movie you’ve seen before. Through its satire, it exposes what’s wrong with training videos in general, not just police training videos, by trying to provide neat, by-the-books answers to deeply complicated problems. Real life doesn’t operate in black-and-white terms, and most of the interactions we experience every day exist in gray areas that people rarely want to talk about. Though it’s obviously a work of fiction, the film points to how life can’t be summed up with a quick summary or a simple “how-to” guide. Real life is much more complicated than the idealized versions we build in our heads, and more often than not, it’s a hell of a lot messier than we’d ever care to admit.

As of this writing, you can stream Survival Skills for free on Tubi.