★½
“Die, please.”
This is not to be confused with the rather higher profile i.e. it’s available on Netflix, Japanese film with the same title, made the same year, and covering a not dissimilar theme. Both are about a woman who is prepared to commit murder, in order to save their best friend from an abusive relationship. However, after the killing in question, the films take divergent paths. The Japflix version becomes a road-trip movie, with the killer and her friend going on the run. This, however, focuses heavily on the killer, whose already fragile mental state falls apart completely, after she discovers that things weren’t quite as she had been led to believe. It’s not her first time at the homicide rodeo either.
For that to work, it needs to have a convincing relationship at its core, and this fails miserably on that level. Ashley (Allen) may be willing to do anything for Mandy (Brooks), but we are never shown why this might be the case: just told it, and expected to accept this at face-value. It’s less credible than the BFFs in Jennifer’s Body, and that is a low bar indeed. It doesn’t help that Brooks is, to put it bluntly, one of the worst actresses I’ve seen given a major role in a movie for a very long time. Yet she’s not ever the worst in this movie: that goes to the “grandmother” who recites her lines from off-screen. My granny would have delivered them with greater conviction, and she has been dead for approaching forty years.
Allen is, at least relatively, watchable, with a smokey voice which makes her resemble a young version of Yancy Butler. The film did manage to hold my attention for about 20 minutes. This began with Ash shooting the abusive boyfriend (Rehman) in the face, and having to deal with an unexpected witness (Blundon), and runs through the revelation that upends Ashley’s worldview. However, the movie singularly fails to do anything significant with it, and all the hallucinatory nonsense thereafter, with Ash being visited by her victims, was completely unable to re-ignite my interest. There is zero development, and too many strands are painstakingly set up, only to go nowhere, e.g. the nosy waitress, another performance which it would be kind to call thoroughly wretched.
The complete lack of any official interest in the killing spree is understandable, the budget clearly not stretching to any forces in authority. Yet this does not excuse the second half degenerating into dull scenes of Ashley driving around, mindless chit-chat or PG-rated lesbian canoodling with more people who can’t emote their way out of a moist paper-bag. In (marginal) defense, they are not helped by a number of scenes apparently being re-dubbed in post, or a musical score that doesn’t so much complement the on-screen action, as compete vigorously with it for attention. It’s a race to the bottom there, and neither aspect gets out of here alive.
Dir: Aly Hardt
Star: Vanessa Allen, Hannah Brooks, Celeste Blandon, Raavian Rehman