★½
“Too little, and much too late.”
I feel the need to start with the IMDb synopsis, because it explains things considerably better than the film. “The Story of two former military criminals turned special sleeper cell Soldiers of Fortune by a secret agency called “The Order of the Black Box”. While agent Sage Martinez is undercover as a low level drug dealer’s wife her more volatile and violent sister Jay Bird is A.W.O.L that’s until they get orders for a special mission (their last kill mission to buy their freedom).” This bears so marginal relationship to what I just watched, if it weren’t for the characters’ names matching, I’d be wondering if it came from a completely different film. Little beyond the names is recognizable.
Here’s what I have. Two women: one strangles her demanding husband, the other kills a pair of security guards who attempt to sexually assault her. There’s something about a mysterious black box left on the former’s doorstep. The pair then meet and team up to take on a cannibalistic family who have been abducting and eating babies. The end. On the copy I saw, the entire film (which runs not much over forty minutes) then repeats in a “Director’s Cut” version. I guess this is slightly more coherently assembled, but is almost exactly the same footage, broken into chapters. It comes no closer to covering the points in the synopsis above.
This is, according to the credits, “Raphael Robinson’s Black Day.” On the one hand, it demonstrates a chunky ego. Usually, you become known first, then get to attach your name to your films, e.g. John Carpenter’s Vampires. Who the hell is Raphael Robinson? According to the IMDb, he had one (1) feature before this, which had no votes, critic or user reviews. Bit early to be going Francis Ford Coppola. On the other hand, if Black Day is anyone’s, it would be Robinson’s, since he wrote, produced, directed, edited and did the cinematography on it. He is literally the only crew member mentioned on the film’s IMDb page. The charitable reaction is: very gracious of him to shoulder responsibility and accept all the blame.
Because simple coherence is missing here. The synopsis is intriguing. It’s just present in the film at “may contain traces of” level. If it had been laid out correctly, I’d have tolerated this much better, because as a low-budget tale of two heroines going after cannibals, it has some energy. Jordan as Jay and Kay as Sage possess presence. Watching them chew up and spit out the members of the Darkwell clan, working their way up to patriarch Creed (Kenney) made for slightly amusing in-flight entertainment (god knows what my fellow passengers thought!). There are occasional moments where Robinson seems to have a clue what he’s doing behind the camera. But it doesn’t appear he read his own film’s synopsis, and the whole thing feels painfully like it was made up as he went along.
Dir: Rapheal Robinson
Star: Krissy Kay, Llola Jordan, Bill K. Kenney, Ella Rose Henning