Tag: crime

Gloria (1999)

  By

★★½
“Gloria, non in excelsis“

Nineteen years after the original, four-time Oscar nominated director Lumet opted to remake Cassavetes’s movie. Though by some accounts, it was more a case of him wanting to work, rather than being particularly attracted to the project. If the results are anything to go by, he should have stayed at home. For the film was a bomb, and leading lady Stone received a Razzie nomination for her efforts. I wouldn’t have said she was that bad, though she’s clearly not at the same level as Gina Rowlands in the original. It does also address some of what I felt were its’ predecessor’s weaknesses. However, it tones down the central character, and this helps lead to what you’d be hard-pressed to argue is other than an inferior product overall.

It keeps the basic premise. Gloria (Stone) becomes the unwilling custodian of a young boy (Figueroa), whose family was wiped out by the mob. However, the kid is in possession of incriminating data, which could either be his salvation or his death knell, so Gloria has to protect him as the Mafiosi try to hunt him down. The big change is, rather than being a neighbour with some mob ties, Gloria here has just got out of jail, having served a three-year sentence after refusing to squeal on her boyfriend, mob lieutenant Kevin (Brit actor Northam, sporting a very credible New York accent, i.e. Chris didn’t complain about it!). When he brushes her off, she absconds with both the boy and the floppy disk which holds the data here. All 1.44 MB of it, I guess. For comparison, the original image of the poster (right) is larger than that. Gotta love tech in the nineties.

This does give the film a clear antagonist in Kevin, something lacking in the previous version, and the child here is less irritating, with a character that seems more consistent. The problem is Stone’s take on the character, which feels like the “Is Diet Pepsi alright?” flavour of the character. This one is considerably less ruthless: while she is happy to wave a gun around, I don’t recall her ever shooting anyone, which Gloria v1.0 did with an almost reckless abandon. Her motivation is also considerably more selfish, spawned (at least initially) by a desire to hit back at Kevin for dumping her.

You can perhaps tell the difference simply by comparing the posters for the two movies. The one here appears more interested in putting Stone’s cleavage front and centre: I note the kid did not stay in this picture. Indeed, on its own merits, this would have been a fairly marginal entry for the site, since it’s closer to a thriller-drama than an action movie. It does possess some effective enough moments, though some of these are cribbed wholesale from the original. This is not as terrible a remake as its reputation indicates: the core concept is too strong for that. Yet any purpose to it remains obscure at best, and entirely missing at worst.

Dir: Sidney Lumet
Star: Sharon Stone, Jean-Luke Figueroa, Jeremy Northam, George C. Scott

Boxcar Bertha

  By

★★★
“Tracks of my tears.”

After the success of Bloody Mama, producer Roger Corman wanted to follow up with another film depicting lawlessness in the Depression. He found his source material in Sister of the Road, supposedly the autobiography of a thirties drifter called Boxcar Bertha. No such one person actually existed: it was assembled by the author, Dr. Ben L. Reitman, from multiple characters he met while helping women in trouble in Chicago (a fictionalized version of the doctor may appear in the movie). Corman hired the then almost unknown Martin Scorsese, who was directing his first commercial film; its predecessor, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, grossed only $16,085.  Scorsese was given a schedule of 24 days and a budget of $600,000.

It begins with Bertha Thompson (Hershey) hitting the road after her father is killed when his crop-dusting plane crashes. Accompanied by her father’s mechanic Von Morton (Casey), she falls in with union leader Big Bill Shelly (Carradine), who is rousing workers against railroad owners such as H. Buckram Sartoris (played by Carradine’s father John), as well as card sharp Rake Brown (Primus). Bertha becomes an outlaw after shooting a man who catches Rake cheating, and Bill’s union activities end up leaving him in prison. Bertha helps break him out, and the quartet take up a life of crime, robbing the rich industry barons, who are none too pleased by the gang’s activities. Inevitably – especially if you’re familiar with Scorsese’s better-known work – it ends in blood.

In that, as well as the era and the story of young love gone violently wrong, it feels not dissimilar to Bonnie and Clyde, made five years earlier. But Bertha is a considerably more independent character, who has to fend for herself on more than one occasion, after her three colleagues are arrested and sent to prison. Though violence is never her first choice, it always remains an option. That’s true right through the brutal finale where Bill is nailed to the side of a train, only for Von to show up with a shotgun. It is a scene that could have come from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (three years earlier), yet also feels like pure Scorsese.

The socialist and pro-union political leanings, turning Bertha and her crew into Depression-era Robin Hoods, is also interesting. Scorsese would not be a stranger to a sympathetic portrayal of the criminal classes, from Mean Streets through Casino to The Irishman. Yet it also remains a Corman film, clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes, in sharp contrast to Scorsese’s subsequent fondness for sprawling epics. Hershey, then at the beginning of her lengthy career, would provide the necessary nudity. Though it’s notable that even when working as a prostitute, she might allow the use of her body, but her heart always remained Bill’s. Despite the exploitation elements, it all feels a bit worthy, and it’s no wonder Scorsese would quickly go his own way, his interests not in line with Corman. For example, the crucifixion of Bill, with Bertha in the role of Mary Magdalene is a tad too on the nose. The heroine is an interesting enough creature on her own terms, not to need this kind of unsubtle embellishment.

Dir: Martin Scorsese
Star: Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, Barry Primus, Bernie Casey

Black Medicine

  By

★★★
“The Hypocritic oath…”

I guess, at its heart, this is the story of two mothers. There’s Jo (Campbell-Hughes), an anaesthetist who has been struck off the medical register, for reasons that are left murky. She’s now practicing her healing arts on the underground market, from patching up dubious stabbing victims, to carrying out unlicensed abortions. Jo lost her daughter to meningitis, and has split from her husband. Then there’s Bernadette (Brady), a wealthy but no less murky character. Her daughter is dying, and in desperate need of a transplant. To that end, Bernadette has kidnapped a young woman, Aine (McNulty), with the intention of using her as an unwilling organ donor, and needs Jo’s help for the operation. But when Aine – who would be about the age of Jo’s daughter had she lived – escapes and hides in the back of the physician’s car, Jo is left with a series of difficult decisions.

Set in Northern Ireland, this is solid rather than spectacular. It has a good central performance at its core by Campbell-Hughes, who plays a complex and contradictory character. For example, Jo has a major drug-habit, yet remains highly functioning. [I’d never seen someone administer illicit pharmaceuticals through eye-drops before. Chris, apparently, was aware of this: I bow to her superior knowledge of such things, likely stemming from her life in eighties New York!] You sense the point that what she is being asked, and eventually ordered, to do has crossed a moral line in the sand, even if her recalcitrance is going to cause more problems. That’s because Bernadette is prepared to do whatever it takes to save her own daughter – something Jo was unable to do.

It’s the contract and similarities between the two women which keep the film interesting, both being utterly convinced their actions are morally justified, although the film-makers’ sympathies are clearly more with Jo. Less effective is the plotting, which feels far from watertight. Perhaps the biggest hole is the way in which Bernadette discovers Aine’s location, after the latter places a call to her boyfriend from Jo’s landline. Aside from being very stupid on Aine’s part, and not in line with the street-smart character to that point, I’m not sure I even know anyone who has a landline. Except for my father, and he’s 85. Jo’s ex-husband seems to exist purely to give Bernadette some kind of leverage, and generally, there are a number of unanswered questions whose answers I feel would have benefited the narrative.

Eastwood, making his feature debut, does have a nice style, depicting Belfast almost entirely at night, in a moist, neon-drenched way that lends it a certain exotic flavour. This would make an interesting double-bill with the similarly Irish-set A Good Woman is Hard to Find, which is also about a woman forced into an unwanted confrontation with the criminal world, by the sudden arrival in her life of an unexpected visitor. This isn’t quite as compelling, lacking the relentless sense of escalation, yet did still keep me engaged for the bulk of the running time, and offers an original scenario with effort put into developing both its heroine and the villainess.

Dir: Colum Eastwood
Star: Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Amybeth McNulty, Orla Brady, Shashi Rami

Knucks

  By

½
“Knucks sucks.”

I’m tempted to leave my review at that. But there’s a famous quote by critic Roger Ebert, going off on Bruce Willis flop, North: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.” I was always impressed, and hoped one day to find a film capable of producing a similar reaction. This is… close. It is, let’s be clear, utterly terrible, with almost no redeeming qualities. Yet it’s either not bad enough, or more likely, too bad to generate such a reaction. That would be giving it more power and credit than this deserves. 

Why are we here? This is less an existential question than a desire to explain why I’m writing a review. It’s because of this synopsis: “Two women attempt to come up after beating their drug dealer to death.” That was good enough to get it on my radar. However, within a couple of minutes, it was clear I had made a terrible mistake, and was about to be in for the longest 66 minutes of my life. Here’s another quote, from the BBFC, explaining the 15 rating: “There are scenes in which a child is abducted by two men, but it is not clear what their intentions are.” The two words “not clear” are the best way to summarize the misbegotten art-wank which I endured, substituting pointless video manipulation for plot, characterization or any positive aspects.

It’s as if the makers had obtained a list of all the elements I despise most about pretentious movies, and had treated it as a request list. Random colour filters. Check. Strobe effects. Check. Shitty heavy metal soundtrack. Check. Obtuse dialogue. Check. Scenes unfolding in murky near-darkness. Check. Shaky, hand-held, extreme close-up camerawork. Check, check and, in no uncertain terms, check. The basic plot, and I use the word in its loosest way, is mostly ripped off from True Romance, with heroines and sisters Kathleen (Leidy) and Taylor (Harlan) attempting to sell a bagful of drugs obtained from the dead dealer, to someone who looks like a Kid Rock impersonator.

But this doesn’t really show up until the final fifteen minutes. Until then, we get meaningless flashbacks to their abusive childhood (of course!), in which their film-maker father seems to be involved in porn and snuff. I am not exaggerating when I say either of these would likely be more entertaining. Things come to a head, when the original owner of the drugs shows up, burbles threateningly for a bit, before keeling over. It ends in much the same way as the previous hour has unfolded: an incoherent mess. I was genuinely relieved by the short running-time, though if it had been much longer, it might well have been a rare cinematic “did not finish.” The terminally slow end credit crawl was easily the best thing about this. Largely because it indicated the end was mercifully nigh.

Dir: Gage Maynard
Star: Dasha Leidy, Hedley Harlan, Mindy Robinson, Alan Bagh

Filibus

  By

★★★
“The first action heroine?”

Ladies and gentlemen, we appear to have a new record holder for the earliest action heroine feature film. Dating from all the way back in 1915, and thus pipping Joan the Woman by a year, comes this silent Italian movie. It’s about Filibus (Creti), an infamous thief whose exploits have become legendary, to the extent that one of her victims offers a large reward for her capture. Filibus, in one of her alternate identities, Baroness Troixmonde, visits the victim, asking if she can put her amateur investigation skills to the test. There, she meets Detective Kutt-Hendy (Spano), who is on her trail, and decides she’s going to frame him for her crimes. Drugging him, she obtains his fingerprints, and uses these as some of the evidence against Kutt-Hendy, implicating him in the theft of a pair of valuable diamonds.

There’s a lot of remarkably cool stuff here, considering the era, such as the airship by which Filibus travels, allowing her to drop silently into any desired location. Kutt-Hendy does his best to catch his target, e.g. using a tiny hidden camera to catch her in the act. But she always manages to be one step ahead of him: with the aid of some more drugs and her minions, the gadget only catches the detective apparently red-handed (right). Kutt-Hendy begins to believe he may actually be Filibus himself, visiting a doctor who wonders if his patient may be committing crimes in his sleep. The tables are eventually turned after the cop figures out how to stop being left unconscious. However, Filibus has the last laugh, escaping and leaving a note that suggests they may meet again.

There had been earlier serials with female protagonists, such as 1914’s The Perils of Pauline, and also occasional movies, e.g. Protéa. with supporting characters who were “heroine adjacent” for want of a better phrase. But it feels as if Filibus could be transplanted wholesale into the modern era, with little or no modification. Indeed, the way she uses another alternate identity, Count de la Brive, to court Kutt-Hendry’s sister, Leonora (Ruspoli) has been seized upon enthusiastically by some, calling the heroine a champion of transgenderism, even though this plot thread never goes anywhere significant. It exists purely to get Filibus close to her target, and there’s no evidence her interest is genuine.

Let’s be clear though: if surprisingly modern in story, the production values on this are as primitive as you’d expect from the era. Production company Corona Film were a short-lived and low-budget studio, and compared to Joan, this is a considerably less impressive spectacle. You also never get any real sense of emotion from the lead actress: Creti was almost unknown, even at the time. This contrasts with Spano, who does act to good effect, particularly his angst at apparently being a criminal. It’s on YouTube, though you have to find your own subs for it, and it’s entirely silent there – I’d suggest providing your own soundtrack when viewing. But as an example of something that is arguably a century ahead of its time, it is worth a watch.

Dir: Mario Roncoroni
Star: Valeria Creti, Giovanni Spano, Filippo Vallino, Cristina Ruspoli

Yakuza Princess

  By

★★½
“Anyone for Brazillian sushi?”

The above odd combination is actually a fairly accurate assessment of what you have here. It’s a Yakuza action-thriller… but rather than being set in Tokyo or Osaka, is relocated to the Brazillian city of Sao Paolo. As an introductory credit helpfully informs us, this has the largest Japanese population of any city outside Japan. The story concerns two separate people’s quests for their pasts, which (to absolutely no-one’s surprise) turn out to be intertwined. One of these is Akemi (MASUMI), who as a young child was the sole survivor of a 1999 massacre of her Yakuza family back in Japan, was subsequently spirited away by allies and is now living in Brazil. The other is Shiro (Rhys-Meyers), an amnesiac who wakes up in hospital with no clue as to how he got there or his identity, except for a Japanese sword.

Also in the mix is Takeshi (Ihara), a Japanese mobster, who discovers Akemi’s location and heads to Sao Paolo to track her down. But what are his intentions? What are Shiro’s intentions? Indeed, what are anyone’s intentions? For this is a film which plays its cards very close to its chest, in a murky world where loyalty is hard to establish, and may not be what it initially seems. This makes for a rather frustrating viewing experience, since we are largely in the dark – along with the heroine, in all fairness. Still, Akemi and Shiro don’t even meet up until after 40 minutes have passed; up to which point, this has felt like two separate movies, taking place in the same location.

There’s also some stuff about the sword Akemi wields eating souls, though this can largely be ignored without impact. It all adds up to a rather excessive 111 minute running-time, and would likely have been helped by some choice editing. The action is occasionally not bad, but is definitely hampered by an editing style, which refuses to have the camera pointed in the same direction for longer than half a second. What the film does mostly have going for it, is solid cinematography, which makes Sao Paolo look like a side-street in Blade Runner. But outside of scraps of Portuguese dialogue, I didn’t get much Brazillian flavour, rendering the setting somewhat pointless.

There are some interesting or appealing moments, such as where Shiro sits down with a couple of veteran Yakuza to watch an old samurai flick, or Akemi’s escape with him over the roof-tops. However, there’s a lot of walking about and chit-chat, before we eventually get to the meat of the matter, and it’s not enough to sustain broad interest. I suspect it may have been better if the film had concentrated on either Akemi or Shiro, both in terms of providing greater focus, and in slimming down the running time. For what results here is something which seems a bit bloated, yet despite that, doesn’t imbue its characters with enough depth.

Dir: Vicente Amorim
Star: MASUMI, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Toshiji Takeshima

Banshee

  By

★★
“Blows a cylinder”

This one is slightly unusual among action-heroine films, in that it was both written and directed by women: Kirsten Elms and Kari Skogland respectively. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly an advert for their gender; after a brisk start, it falls apart, and becomes a ridiculously implausible movie, in a completely different genre from where it started. That’s a real pity, because where it started, had a lot more potential than where it ends up. It begins with Sage Rion (Manning), a young but highly-talented thief, taking a bet with her partner, as to who can boost a classic car quickest. She picks a 1966 Dodge Challenger, but inadvertently leaves her ID at the scene of the crime.

Back at her house, she finds a note telling Sage to return the car, or the owner will kill her partner, whom he has kidnapped. She does, even though this puts her in deep water with her employer, for having taken and returned the Dodge in defiance of his orders. And this is where the script goes, not just off the road, but through the crash-barrier and down an embankment into a ravine. For Sage is the recipient of a severed head, and gets framed for the murder of her partner. This forces her on the run, taking shelter in the apartment of hooker friend Brenna (Williams) as the police hunt her. However, rookie cop Fitz (Lombardi) thinks there may be more to it than that. Sage hunts down the owner of the Dodge herself, discovering in the end he is a mad DJ serial killer, who kidnaps and tortures his female victims for the sounds they make, which he incorporates into his mixes.

You may want to read that sentence again. Slowly.

What, pray tell, was wrong with the fresh idea of a young, cocky girl car thief, that it was deemed necessary to apply all this sub-Se7en nonsense to it? It was doing perfectly fine as is. She’d been established as a solid character, with some endearing quirks – for instance, she won’t sleep with any man, unless he first volunteers to cook for her. It would have been interesting enough, to see how she’d handle dealing with her irritable and prone to violence boss. Instead, that angle gets all but discarded when the movie moves on to the “lunatic disk-jockey”. It briefly re-appears, only to be ended in a largely ridiculous method of closure.

The other elements of the film are banal and by the book. You have Fitz and his grizzled partner, who suspects the worst of Sage, for no particular reason (I mean, they could easily figure out the head was severed elsewhere?). And the serial killer is little more than a walking set of cliches, who kidnaps Brenna in order to get to Sage, because… Oh, I dunno. I’d largely lost the will to live by that point in proceedings. So much potential here, only for it to be so completely wasted.

Dir: Kari Skogland
Star: Taryn Manning, Romano Orzari, Michael Lombardi, Genelle Williams

Loss Prevention

  By

★★★½
“Missing this would be your loss”

After a series of recent films which… well, let’s just say, left a little to be desired, it was a real palate-cleansing pleasure to encounter this. Oh, make no mistake: this is no classic. But, considering the budget was supposedly under $20,000, this operates within its limitations very nicely. The makers sticks to what they can do, and what it does, it does more than adequately. In particular, the movie is populated with a good number of interesting characters, that are fun to watch. The central one is Nik (Uhl), a young woman who dropped out of college and is now scraping by, working behind the bar at The Soggy Weasel, the pub belonging to her father (former wrestler Snow).

However, her slackerish lifestyle is rudely interrupted when one patron drinks too much, and has to be separated from his keys. Unfortunately, the key-chain also holds a flash drive of industrial espionage data, which he was supposed to hand over to Boland (Wells), the operative of a rival company. Boland is unimpressed, and will go to any lengths to retrieve it, providing the bottom line is deemed sufficiently profitable. Fortunately for Nik, also on hand is Brooke (Albert), a thoroughly competent operative of the company who is the data’s rightful owner, and she takes on the defense of Nik and her father. Not that Nik is averse to getting her own hands dirty, as things turn out.

It does take a little while for things to kick off, as we get introduced to the characters. Nik is more than slightly sarcastic, so can only be respected as such, and also a thoroughly unrepentant lesbian – both combine in an entirely unrepeatable comment about breath mints. But Hollywood could learn a lot about depicting sexual identity from this, which makes absolutely no attempt at moral posturing in this area. Instead, it’s far too busy providing a fast-paced gallop around the city of Louisville, ending up in Brooke and Nik mounting an assault on the headquarters where Boland is holding her father hostage. Yet there’s a twist or two to come, with things not quite ending in the massive firefight you’d expect – another way in which this manages to confound expectations.

In its depiction of corporate warfare, this is rather sophisticated for a low-budget action flick. In particular, Boland’s actions are entirely determined by an accounting of the expected profits and loss. For instance, is it cheaper to buy someone off, or kill them, with all the resulting collateral expenses? It absolutely is not personal with him, just a question of what will balance the books most profitably. The same is true, to a slightly lesser degree, for Brooke – if I heard a late line of dialogue correctly, her surname in the film is Shields! This is an approach which plays into the unexpected finale, when Nik comes up with a solution which satisfies everybody. Well, almost everybody… This has not one, but two, action heroines who are fun to watch, and was considerably better than I expected

Dir: Brian Cunningham, Matt Niehoff
Star: Abisha Uhl, Al Snow, John Wells, Lauren Albert

Chained

  By

★★
“Puts the gang in chain gang.”

Jaz (Severino) gets arrested by the cops and hauled off to Rikers Island on… well, let’s say slightly bogus charges. Her long time pal, Trouble (Martinez) is on the outside and sets about raising bail for Jaz, by any means necessary. That involves putting together a crew of her own who will seize the opportunity to take over drug-running territory in part of their neighbourhood. Needless to say, this decision doesn’t come without perils of its own, both from the authorities and the others with eyes on the profits to be made. Jaz, meanwhile, is having to come to terms with prison life, and isn’t exactly making friends on the inside. Even when the money for her bond is raised, Jaz’s issues aren’t over. However, Trouble finds a solution, after discovering the cops who arrested her have a little side-hustle of their own.

Considering this was made for $15,000, it has its strengths, Most obviously, it feels authentic. The players here may not have much in the way of formal acting experience or training. But I sense they’re not particularly required to do more than be enhanced versions of themselves. The way they act, talk and behave seems legit. Admittedly, who am I to judge? I didn’t exactly grow up on the mean streets of New York. But I can still tell when there is Obvious Acting going on, and it’s a flaw you often see in this kind of low-budget enterprise. I didn’t have to endure that kind of fakery here, and on the whole, the individual scenes were generally fine.

What didn’t work, unfortunately, was the overall flow, with the various plot threads never coming together into a coherent and engaging narrative. I felt like it was taking place over the span of several decades, but there were points when this wasn’t clear. Any film which wraps up with a brief “Twenty years later” scene – in which nobody seems to have aged a day – is on shaky ground. There were also a lot of moments where the script outran the budget. The “police van” in the opening scene, clearly isn’t. Indeed, I genuinely LOL’d later, as the same interior shows up on a van, rented from U-Haul, used for a raid on another gang. If you can’t afford a police van, or at least a decent facsimile, don’t write a scene needing one. The police station and Rikers Island were also… less than convincing, shall we say.

It is likely a little over-stuffed too. For a movie running only 76 minutes, the story tries to cram a lot in, and some of the threads (such as a pregnancy) end up feeling like afterthoughts. More restraint in writer-director Cardona’s ambition would have been for the best. She’s clearly familiar with street life, its characters, and how they behave. When the story sticks to this, the movie is at its most effective, although there’s nothing particularly new or important being said. When it tries to be more expansive, though, the resources just aren’t there, and the shortcomings are painfully apparent.

Dir: Deborah Cardona
Star: Rosemary Severino, Sheerice Martinez, Tyhem Commodore, Lexie Jose

Jack Squad

  By

★★
“Considerably less would have been more.”

At 85 minutes, this might have been fine. For it’s a fairly simple tale, of three women who decide to escape their financial woes by drugging and robbing married men, banking on their victims not being willing to involve the authorities. While this initially works as planned, inevitably, they end up targeting the wrong guy, a minion of feared drug dealer Grey (Anderson). How evil is he? Grey appears to have an employee whose full-time job is to fan him. That’s some Evil Overlord style, right there. Grey doesn’t just want his stolen money back, he wants the trio to continue their activities – for his benefit. And that isn’t the only problem which the trio face, with Tony, the estranged other half of Dawn (Tares), unhappy at her having escaped their abusive relationship.

Somehow, in the hands of writer-director-producer Rankins, this uncomplicated story runs 128 minutes, which is way too long. If ever there was evidence that films sometimes need someone else to step in and say, literally, “Cut that out,” this would be it. You could go at the “director’s version” blindfolded, with a rusty bread-knife, hacking entire scenes out, attacking others with all the savage brutality of a starving man at a Vegas buffet, and would be incapable of doing any real harm to the end product. If you can’t see where half an hour couldn’t be excised, to the general improvement of the pacing, you’re not trying hard enough.

Which is at least somewhat of a shame, since this wasn’t otherwise as bad as I thought it might be. It is certainly an improvement over the director’s almost unwatchable, Chop Shop. The three leads are adequate, and the script gives them reasonably well-delineated characters. As well as recovering abuse victim Dawn, there’s fashion student Kennedy (Halfkenny), who has qualms about the whole endeavour. Though she’s also the one who triggers the escalating body-count, by robbing Grey’s underling. And then we have Mona (Williams) who develops a liking for the violence, and gradually becomes a fully-fledged psychopath. The three different personalities certainly provide plenty of scope for drama and conflict, as they try to figure out how to handle their increasingly untenable situation.

That said, some of the attitudes here are difficult to empathize with. For example, Kennedy ghosts the kind but poor fellow student, apparently preferring the lure of well-heeled “pharmaceutical” workers. And that’s how you end up in abusive relationships, folks, or having to chase down your baby daddy for child support, as recently documented in Sweet Justice. There’s also no getting over the low-budget approach, most obvious in “gunfire” which couldn’t be much more fake, if the people wielding the weapons were yelling “Bang!” and using their fingers as firearms. But the major problem is the one described above: a self-indulgent approach, almost as if Rankins believed everything filmed had to be included in the final product. When making a low-budget feature, like this, you may need to wear many hats. But that does not negate the need for external and neutral guidance.

Dir: Simuel Rankins
Star: Dawnisha Halfkenny, Onira Tares, Patshreba Williams, Benjamin Anderson