Yoga Hosers is a 2016 comedy horror film by Kevin Smith, the second in his "True North" trilogy. It stars Smith's daughter Harley Quinn Smith and Lily-Rose Depp, reprising their roles from Tusk.
Childhood friends Colleen Collette (Depp) and Colleen McKenzie (Smith) are two average 15-year-old girls from Winnipeg. In between high school, doing Yoga, playing in a rock band and burying their noses in their phones, the two work at the Eh-2-Zed convenience store, which is owned by Colleen C's divorcee father.
One night during their shift Colleen M's crush Hunter Calloway (Austin Butler) invites the girls to a Grade-12 party, but after Colleen C's father takes off for an impromptu trip to Niagara Falls with his girlfriend, leaving the girls to mind the store while he's gone, they invite Hunter to bring the party there instead. As it turns out, Hunter and his friend Gordon (Tyler Posey) are Satanists, hoping to get the Colleens alone to sacrifice them. However, once they arrive, the store is overrun with Bratzis - foot-tall monsters made from bratwurst who resemble Nazis - who kill the two boys, after which the Colleens destroy them with their yoga skills.
After getting arrested for the murders of Hunter and Gordon, the girls are interrogated by man-hunter Guy Lapointe (Johnny Depp), who informs the girls that the Bratzis are the work of, and may lead him to, the notorious Andronicus Arcane, former right hand man to the self-proclaimed "Canadian Führer" Adrien Arcand. As the girls had learned from their most recent history class, Arcand briefly held influence in Winnipeg before his arrest, after which Arcane disappeared and was never heard from again. Lapointe sneaks the Colleens out of the police station to help investigate, and the three soon discover something sinister that's been living under the Eh-2-Zed for the last 70 years.
Soorey aboot these tropes
- Affectionate Parody: Like Tusk, this film is Kevin Smith's take on "rubber suit monster" b-movies.
- Alliterative Name: Colleen Collette.
- Arc Number: Kevin Smith's infamous 37 appears twice in the film.
- Colleen C.'s father sends her 37 text messages when he makes her and Colleen M. work the store on the night when they intend to go to the Grade 12 party.
- Arcand has been living 37 miles under the Eh-2-Zed.
- Arc Words: "Basic."
- Artistic License – Linguistics: The French Colleen C speaks sounds more European than Québécois. Presumably this is because Lilly-Rose Depp grew up in France.
- Ascended Extra: The Colleens, who first appeared in Tusk as nameless store clerks for all of five seconds.
- Ass Shove: The Bratzis' preferred method of attack.
- Author Appeal: Let's see—a convenience store setting, hockey, comics references, a plot against critics, a heroine played by his daughter...some reviewers quipped that Kevin Smith basically made a movie for which he, and he alone, was the target audience.note
- Beam Me Up, Scotty!: In-Universe. The Colleens imitate Batman (as played by Christian Bale) by repeatedly saying "Where's the trigger?!" in a deep voice. Guy Lapointe then points out that Batman never said that.
- The Cameo:
- Kevin Conroy plays a customer who berates the Colleens after they sell him the wrong cigarettes. The guy who comes to the store with him is even called Robin.
- Stan "The Man" Lee as the police dispatcher.
- Celebrity Paradox: On the page from Them Weekly that is seen twice in the film, under the picture of Harry Styles, there's one of Kevin Smith with his wife and friends. Three of the people in the picture (Smith himself, Jennifer Schwalbach and Jason Mewes) have parts in the movie.
- Chekhov's Skill: The girls' New-Age Retro Hippie yoga comes in handy when kicking monsters' asses.
- Continuity Nod: Events of Tusk are briefly mentioned at the beginning of the movie and later in the first discussion between the Colleens and Guy Lapointe.
- Don't Explain the Joke: After sarcastically telling the Colleens about how difficult their lives must be, Principal Invincible, who is Black, feels it necessary to explain to them that a Black person should not be saying that to two white girls.
- Foreshadowing:
- Colleen M: "It's just a senior party, not the Nazi party."
- Principal Invincible: "Be nice! There are enough haters in the world!"
- Halfway Plot Switch: Forget halfway. Every act is a different movie! The first is a high school movie about two girls trying to go to a Grade-12 party; the second is about escaping murderous Satanists; the third is about fighting a Nazi in hiding who's spent 70 years planning a mass genocide of art critics.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: The Colleens. The two even sleep in the same bed with no indication of romance.
- Human Popsicle: Arcane's original plan is to let his Brahtzis incubate for 100 while he cryogenically froze himself.
- Honey Trap: Hunter's Grade 12 party is just a trick to sacrifice the Colleens.
- Just a Stupid Accent: You can tell Arcane is from Berlin because his voice is scary and creepy.
- Keep It Foreign: In the French dub, Colleen C's lines in French have been changed to lines in Quebec French, mostly using words and expressions exclusive to the dialect, enough for Colleen M to understand none of it.
- Large Ham: Miss Wickland, the Colleen's gym teacher.
- Man of a Thousand Voices: Andronicus spend his entire first year out of cryogenic freeze watching every single movie on Netflix to learn about the outside world. As such, he's picked up a pretty good talent as a mimic and, in an effort to make his evil plot seem less scary, explains it in multiple celebrity impersonations, such as Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and... Ed Wynn.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Hunter's plan to sacrifice the Colleens once they invite him to bring his party to the Eh-2-Zed: break some merchandise and steal some money to make it look like a robbery.note
- Meaningful Name:
- Colleen M.'s mother gives her a switchblade to defend herself from grabby boys at the Grade 12 party which she calls "The Mohel." A mohel is someone trained to give circumcisions.
- Hunter Calloway hunts the Colleens for a virgin sacrifice.
- Averted with Toilet Paper Man. The Colleens call him that because he bought toilet paper once.
- Monster Threat Expiration: Without their pointy helmets allowing them to shoot themselves up a person's derriere, the Bratzis become a lot less threatening. It only took one Bratzi each time to kill François, Hunter and Gordon, but later, the Colleens had no trouble disposing of dozens of helmetless Bratzis.
- Moose and Maple Syrup: As the second film in Kevin Smith's "True North" trilogy, it's set in Canada and everyone comically exaggerates their "soorey"s and "aboot"s, and epitomized by the Punny Name of the store they work in - "Eh-2-Zed".
- New-Age Retro Hippie: The Colleens take yoga instructions from licensed instructor Yogi Bayer and refuse to take part in their school's group yoga class because it's not "real" yoga.
- Negative Continuity: Guy Lapointe now has a mole on his face, while he didn't have one last time. Moreover it keeps shifting around his face from shot to shot, and towards the end of the movie, he suddenly has three of them, and then seven. It was done on purpose (see Shout-Out below).
- No Periods, Period: Averted. Colleen M lies to her mother that she's going to get her period soon so she can take a night off from work to go to the party, but her mother knows she lying because their cycles are in sync.
- No Smoking: Save for two scenes where Guy Lapointe is briefly seen vaping, this is Kevin Smith's first movie to feature absolutely no smoking of any kind, cigarettes or joints.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted. The two main characters are two girls named Colleen.
- Phoneaholic Teenager: Both Colleens. They're even seen falling asleep with their phones in their hands. When their gym teacher take them away for refusing to participate in the school's group yoga class, Colleen M. faints from withdrawal. It becomes a plot point when Arcane asks the girls to photograph him next to his sculpture, but they can't because Guy didn't get their phones back from the police when he snuck them out of the precinct.
- Phrase Catcher: Everyone who doesn't take the Colleens seriously calls them "goddamn yoga hosers".
- Regional Riff: Every character introduction is accompanied by an 8-bit rendition of "Oh, Canada."
- Shout-Out:
- Colleen M's "I WASN'T EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE TODAY!!" Fitting, as her dad directed that movie.
- Guy's mole moves from shot-to-shot à la Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
- Colleen McKenzie's last name comes from the McKenzie brothers.
- As Arcane loads the Brahtzi's into his sculpture, he tells them "Fly my pretties! Fly!". He also sings "Let's All Go To The Lobby."
- The girls' yoga instructor is named Yogi Bayer, and is frequently on the phone with a lawyer over whether or not he's legally allowed to use his own name for his studio.
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Spiritual Successor: The film seems to be taking a lot of cues from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Fitting, as Kevin Smith is a big fan of that movie. - Standard Snippet: Arcane is introduced with a section of Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung.
- Take That!: When Colleen M. asks if Canadian Hitler was as bad as Canadian Idol.Colleen C.: "Nothing is worse than Canadian Idol."
- Take That, Critics!: In-Universe. Andronicus Arcane's grand scheme is to send an army of monsters after every art critic in the world. Lapointe said that critics aren't real people, so it doesn't matter.
- Those Wacky Nazis: ...Who invade Canada, hide out under a convenience store and come back 70 years later with an army of bratwurst monsters.
- Totally Radical: The Colleens are very keen on the words "basic" and "hashtag."
