'Bad Trip' Probably Wouldn't Have Worked if It Had All Been Filmed in One Place — or at One Time

If you take Bad Grandpa and mix in a little bit of Borat, you'll probably get something like Eric Andre and Lil Rel Howery's Bad Trip. It's a semi-scripted comedy about two friends who travel across the country so one of them can declare love to their high school crush. Instead of a typical road trip movie, though, there are lots of hidden camera pranks and moments with unsuspecting locals from different places across the United States.

Some viewers are now wondering where and when Bad Trip was filmed. Eric and Lil Rel actually traveled to a few different states, so in that regard, the movie is totally legit. And many of the people who ended up falling prey to their pranks or just being witness to their antics were real too. There were still scripted moments, but regardless, it's one of those secondhand embarrassment movies you can't look away from.

According to IMDb, Bad Trip was filmed in California, Georgia, South Carolina, and New York City. The premise of the movie takes best friends Bud (Lil Rel) and Chris (Eric) on a road trip while Bud's prison escapee sister (Tiffany Haddish) follows the breadcrumbs they accidentally leave behind. Along the way, the pair's hijinks get them into all sorts of trouble with people who believe everything they're doing and saying is real — including when one of them risks his life on the roof of a building.

Because there are so many pranks played on people who have no idea they're even being filmed, it makes sense that Eric and Lil Rel had to take their movie on the road. If they had stayed in one area, it would have been much harder for local people to believe that everything they got themselves into was legitimate. It still doesn't make any of it less embarrassing for viewers at home, though.

Eric told Men's Health that Bad Trip was in the making for quite some time. If you noticed that no one in the film was wearing a mask or social distancing, there's a reason for that — the movie was made way before COVID-19 was a thing. It was filmed between October 2017 and December 2018. So, why is Bad Trip just coming out now?

According to Eric, Bad Trip's team "finished editing in April 2019, and then we were going to come out in the fall of 2019, and there was a conflicting movie, so we pushed to 2020. And then we got into SXSW, a killer timeslot at SXSW, one of the headliners. And then we were going to premiere worldwide in theaters everywhere in April, and have SXSW be like the sneak peek kickoff. And then the world went to s--t and collapsed." 

The big concern for most fans is if Bad Trip is indeed real. That's the million-dollar question that Jackass and Borat fans have had over the years too. Even if someone may have recognized Eric or Lil Rel, their pranks and the reactions of those they involve in them are all legit in Bad Trip. In fact, as Lil Rel explained to Entertainment Weekly, one prank that involved him and Eric being attached together by prosthetic penises with a finger trap almost got them into serious trouble.

"We ended up going to the wrong barbershop where the security wasn't there," he said. "Seeing our penises attached in this finger trap was [the barber's] worst nightmare, where he's like, 'Yo, if I ever see this, I'm going to murder somebody.' But he had to say that before in his head, because I don't know anybody that would have gotten that mad before ... He picked up a knife that he was using to shave somebody and chased us out the barbershop."

He added that the film's security guard was able to step in to make sure nothing serious happened. The fact that there was security available nearby doesn't mean any of Bad Trip is less legitimate, though. The movie was filmed with real pranks, real reactions, and safeguards in place to make sure the stars made it out OK.