Although not one of the Nick films, The Obsession of Billy Botski has often been discussed and packaged alongside them due to its thematic and stylistic relationship with the official trilogy.
[3] The film centres on Billy Botski, a man who has a creepy obsession with "Connie", a pop culture icon who represents the archetype of the "mythical virgin slut".
[3] Morley Walker of the Winnipeg Sun wrote of the 1983 screening that "by far the project's most striking aspect is that it's a permanent record of Paizs's progress as a filmmaker.
"[1] In an analysis of all of the Nick films alongside The Obsession of Billy Botski, Geoff Pevere wrote that Paisz "speaks to that vast generation of culturally polluted schizophrenic Canadians who grew up with their feet in the slush and their eyes on Beverly Hills, for whom television was a persistently seductive, and ultimately masochistic, vision of what we wished for but could never attain: to be just like our older brother.
It is this institutionalized position as the lesser sibling, peripheral voyeur and perpetual window-shopper at the pop-culture marketplace, that informs these films and lends them a potential for truly relevant rapport among Canadians that is frankly unique among our filmmakers of his generation.