Being married is not always easy, especially if one party tends to do all the taking, while the other one does all the giving. Such is the case for the Wife (Carrie Elrond) in Wade Ballance’s short comedy, THE HusBAND. Tired of her husband (Wes Bailey) constantly snapping his fingers to bring him a beer or messing up their home with their son, the wife goes out to get her hair done and get away from the chaos.
While at the salon, she runs across an ad for a revolutionary device for operant conditioning called “The HusBAND”. A supposedly un-removable training device, the HusBAND emits a shock to the wearer whenever the large button on a special remote is depressed.
She sends off the ad with her payment and, a short time later, the band arrives in a plain wrapper that states that it is a feminine hygiene sample. As feminine hygiene is kryptonite to most men, when the mail arrives, her husband avoids the package like the plague and gets into a mail-order swimsuit catalog instead. After arriving home and finding the package, the wife excitedly goes into a bathroom to open up her prize and finds detailed instructions on how to apply the collar by, essentially, giving her husband a roofie in his drink and then attaching the collar when he’s asleep.
Everything goes as planned and the HusBAND causes her husband to “behave” himself to her liking. It’s so successful that she tells all her girlfriends so that they can order HusBANDs and emasculate their husbands, as well.
After all the husbands in the immediate vicinity have been digitally castrated, they decide they need to work together to overcome their mutual restraints. As they do so, they decide to extract their revenge on their wives.
Content
The unusual thing about Mr. Ballance’s film is that he chose to essentially make a silent film. While sound effects and music are used to fill in the audio spectrum, there’s virtually no speech in the entire film. (With the exception of a single outburst.) To make this work, they had to often use a strange form of pantomime that was very reminiscent of old silent melodramas. While this was pretty effective, there were times that the pantomime was just a little too over the top or a camera would stay on a character too long before cutting away. This was most noticeable when the wife receives the HusBAND package and is excitedly gloating over the power she will now wield. The edit of this part of the scene should be shortened, as it feels simply too melodramatic at its current length.
The overall story arc of the HusBAND was pretty well formed and stopped just shy of being the male equivalent of misogynistic. (How sad that modern man’s plight in America is so under-analyzed that there is no easily recognized male equivalent for misogyny!) The pantomimed acting was good from the main characters and did a decent job of showing the different motivations each one had. Finally, the overall ending left you feeling good, but the way it got to the ending had some problems.
