Sundance — Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s book, Clark Gregg’s first feature Choke brings the story of Victor, a self-absorbed, sex addicted and fatherless conman who discovers he might be a half-clone of Jesus.

Sure Victor Mancini is a sex addict, but he has no problem getting help. In fact his SAA meetings are the best place to meet women. While others in the group talk about getting out of jail and immediately going back to stalking the tranny hooker who put them in there, Victor is off in another room “sponsoring” another addict.

Along with his best friend Denny (a chronic masturbator), Victor works in a theme village where they recreate a day in the life of Americans in the 18th century. He spends most of his days trying to avoid his boss who’s constantly putting Denny in the stocks or banishing them for having “out of period” objects inside the village.

Victor has another source of income too. While eating at restaurants, Victor will purposely choke on his food in hopes of finding a wealthy do-gooder to give him the heimlich. Once they save you, you’ve got a friend for life and who better to ask for money than your friends? Unfortunately the money isn’t for materialistic satisfaction – Victor uses it to care for his mother who’s in the hospital with Alzheimer’s.

Victor does everything he can to keep his mother alive, but not because he wants her to live. She’s been keeping his father’s identity a secret for his whole life and he vows to keep her around until he can get it out of her. When he discovers her old diary, he finds out that she took part in an experiment where the patients where impregnated with DNA taken from a foreskin. But not just any foreskin, but the holy foreskin… making Victor a half-clone of Jesus himself.

Now those of you familiar with Chuck Palahniuk’s books know that this isn’t an unusual life for one of his characters and Clark Gregg does a great job in bringing Choke the book to the screen. Gregg takes the dark comedy of Palahniuk’s 2nd film adaptation (the first was FightClub) and pushes it more towards the comical. So you can laugh without feeling like maybe you shouldn’t. This direction works especially well because of Sam Rockwell who creates a character who’s sick and twisted, comical and vulnerable at the same time.

Choke was quickly snatched up by Fox Searchlight two days ago (for $5 million) so it will definitely be hitting screens sometime soon. To get more info, check out Chuck Palahniuk’s site.