The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks: Sticky, Gushy, Smelly, Farcical Extravaganza

Oli Stening’s The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks commits itself to twenty-one minutes of batty horror and comedy spread across six chapters, following the salami sticks stolen off a cop but going into tangents that are more abrupt than the sprays of blood you get in the face after dismembering a live body. 

Each of the six chapters has its own flavour, taking its inspiration from the apparent delight the salami sticks cause in their eater. They drive people to robbery, dreams of revenge,  mutilation, hallucinations, and, in what is essentially the most relatable and yet as amusingly bizarre as the rest, quasi-sexual encounter. 

The plot opens with a woman (Steffi Gil) walking into a butcher shop (Ivan the butcher played by Stening in an atrocious bald-ing cap)—carcasses and cured meat on every visible surface—to ask if they have vegan meat. The joke would be low-hanging bland fruit if it ended there, but when police officer Sonny (Ben Corlett) walks in, having been robbed of his salami sticks, it turns into a delightfully outlandish retail customer experience that Gil delivers with pitch-perfect extravagance. The five other chapters that follow and/or overlap oscillate between terror and humour (and euphoria, when the narrative returns to the butcher and the vegan woman). The low-stakes score changes accordingly, a lot less bold than the writing or cinematography. The latter does not hesitate to make its presence explicit using, for instance, unexpected zooms-in.  

A chapter in the back of the butcher shop will remind you of the artifice-laden horror of Sweeny Todd, but the film does not lean too heavily on that reference, moving onto its last bizarre episode that circles back to Sonny, who has now acquired a particularly devoted lawyer (Neilson Brown). Those salami sticks had better make you see god (it does make you see clowns, so there’s that). 

The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks finds its humour in the excessive and exaggerated, like schoolboy humour, working well in bits and parts, especially in conjunction with its campy horror. Sonny is in for a bit more salami than he bargained for. 

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