Tag: USA

Suga Babies

  By

★½
“The drugs do work”

As usual, I begin with the normal disclaimer, that I’m about as far from the target audience as you could imagine. For this is an inner-city story about a drug war between three rival gangs in South Carolina: the Guardians, the Dynasty and the GeeChees. That said, however, there have been other films, with not dissimilar themes, which I have enjoyed. Most obviously, I am not the target audience for Pam Grier’s seventies output either. But those still kick ass. Even among the modern entries, there have been ones like Candy, which have felt authentic in their depiction of urban life. This, on the other hand, feels more like a no-budget hip-hop video.

About the main positive is that nobody makes a particular fuss about the Guardians being an all-girl gang, under the loose leadership of Naomi (Mott). They’re just part of the landscape, and everyone accepts that. The cause of the war is a new drug called sugar. In an odd twist, this actually makes people who take it better. We are told it literally cures cancer. I genuinely LOL’d at that. However, the interest of the authorities is limited to a spokesman for Big Pharma, who expresses concern at the street muscling in on “their” turf. It might have been interesting if it turned out Big Pharma had secretly released the drug to the GeeChees for distribution, as a test of its effectiveness. Sadly, not much is done with the concept, with this largely being an excuse for more black-on-black crime.

Indeed, that social crisis is expressly referenced during one of the multiple sequences of “The Buzz”, some chat-show. These really add very little, and the same goes for the supposed “courtroom” scenes. As well as being woefully unconvincing, I don’t think I ever worked out quite who was on trial, or for what. It’s all horribly disjointed, for example a lengthy scene that’s just multiple people picking up drugs from a motel room. Add in sequences which genuinely are no-budget music videos, and the dramatic pickings became painfully thin. There’s just one scene that has any impact. Mouse (McCoy) gets picked up by the Guardians and is found to be dealing sugar for the GeeChees. Her impassioned explanation that she did so because sugar helped her family, is certainly the movie’s emotional high-point.

According to the IMDb, the director had made eight feature films since her first in 2020. That’s an admirable work ethic, to be sure. But I can’t help thinking that churning out fewer movies might lead to an increase in their quality, because this definitely feels rushed, in almost every aspect. Maybe this is what the target audience wants? But it would be patronizing to believe their standards can be satisfied with this kind of thing. On the other hand, this wasn’t even the worst thing I watched today (hello, Battered), at least reaching a bare minimum of technical competence. However, that’s scant praise for any movie.

Dir: Felicia Rivers
Star: Diamond Mott, Patrice Jennings, Shakeela Koffey Scott, Samantha McCoy

Battered

  By

★
“Of unsound mind.”

My first surprise here was that this clocks in at a crisp 44 minutes. That’s an awkward length for any film: too short to be a feature, but most festivals that accept short films will balk at a submission of that length, when the time could instead be used to accept three x 15-minute entries [as someone who runs a festival, this is definitely a consideration]. Quite how this got distribution, I’m therefore not sure; but there it was, sitting on Amazon Prime. However, less than two minutes into the viewing experience, I found myself thanking my stars the running time was so brief. Because this is hamstrung by the worst audio I’ve seen on any film in several years. When even an envelope being opened sounds like a burst of automatic gunfire, you’ve got a problem, and there’s hardly a scene here where this aspect is not bad enough, as to be an unbearable distraction.

It is something of a shame, since it has at least the germ of a decent idea. Piper (Paris) is in an abusive relationship, one that ends up with her being sent to hospital. On her release, she joins a support group for similarly battered women, who share video diaries, as part of the healing process. However, revenge eventually becomes part of their therapeutic activities, taking out their anger on the men who abused them, and these prove viral successes. There is potential for exploration here, not least in the way social media can create and inflame a lynch mob mentality – with the potential for it to spill over into the physical world too. Of course, for that exploration to work, you’d firstly have to be able to tolerate dialogue which sounds like it was recorded either in a wind-tunnel or a diving chamber. Not helping matters: characters that might harbour dreams of some day developing and blossoming into shallow stereotypes. And that’s just the women. Do not get me started on the men.

Then there’s a philosophical argument to be had here. We can all agree it’s wrong for men to beat up women. But this movie seems to make the claim – without much in the way of counterpoints being made – that it’s perfectly fine for women to beat up men. Because social justice. Or #MeToo. Or something, it’s unclear. This could be a viable approach, even without coherent and explicit debate, if the film engaged the lizard brain, and made the violence justifiable, even on a visceral level. Yet it fails to do that either. Instead we get a number of scenes which frankly border on the exploitative, offering a dubious counterpoint to the female empowerment narrative being pushed. Ugly camerawork and performances that, at best, do little more than propel forward the story, are other aspects which left me underwhelmed. It also ends in an abrupt and unsatisfying manner, as if Leslie eventually realized this was going nowhere. Shame it took him 44 minutes to reach that point.

Dir: Lewis Leslie
Star: Mia Paris, Paula Marcenaro Solinger, Carly Jones, Heath C. Heine

Claw

  By

★★★
“Jurassic dog park”

Yeah, the scale here is a bit smaller than the Spielberg classic, to put it mildly. As in… there’s precisely one (1) velociraptor. For reasons that are a bit unclear, this is roaming a deserted Wild West attraction on the road to Los Angeles. Heading to LA are wannabe stand-up comic Julia (Walker) and her flamingly gay best friend, Kyle (Rennie). An accident forces them off the road, and with – what a surprise! – no cell signal, they are forced to seek help at the previously mentioned attraction, where Ray (Mede) is the only inhabitant, and is acting a bit odd. Turns out, there’s good reason for this, with a large, carnivorous prehistoric reptile roaming the facility, the work of a mad scientist (Mertz). Will Julia ever make it to Tinseltown?

Clearly, you have to understand that this is a low-budget entity, and not expect the kind of spectacle provided by larger dinosaur movies. That said, if you stick with it – and the 30 minutes it takes for the lizard mayhem to kick in, seems a lot longer – this isn’t without charm. Once it gets going, there is a fairly non-stop degree of energy, and there’s an interesting role reversal to the typical dynamic of couples in these movies. Kyle is the one who spends much of the time cowering in a corner; it may be stereotypical in its portrayal of homosexuality, but not gratingly so, and it allows Julia to become a bit more pro-active than normal.

If she is not exactly Ellen Ripley, to be sure, we are starting from a considerably lower level to begin with, and that does make her a bit more relatable. Most of what she does, is stuff that you or I could do (okay… probably just you. Getting out of bed is a battle, personally!), rather than any kind of superhuman feat. Between the writing and the performances, the film does a good job of making the characters seem like real people, to a better degree than most cheap B-movies. There’s a lengthy coda, after the film basically ends not past the hour mark, with several unnecessary scenes apparently added to reach feature length. It is probably just worth staying around, purely to hear Julia perform her velociraptor-themed stand-up routine.

The dinosaur is mostly CGI, and is integrated adequately enough into proceedings, though its actual interaction with any physical people or things, is limited to put it mildly. On the other hand, it manages to avoid the frequent pitfall of movies shot at night, where most of the action here takes place. You can actually tell what’s happening, without straining your eyes to peer into an underlit darkness. This positive is less common than you might think. Again, I cannot stress enough that it offers small-scale carnage, at best. However, I was still entertained more than I expected, and was left willing to give this the benefit, of the more than considerable doubts I had going in.

Dir: Gerald Rascionato
Star: Chynna Walker, Richard Rennie, Mel Mede, Ken Mertz

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

A Killer Rising

  By

★★½
“FBI Agent Jekyll and Hyde”

At least a star of the above rating is purely for the concept, which is one just brimming with potential. The problem here is entirely down to execution that isn’t just lacklustre, it’s entirely devoid of all lustre. First and foremost, there is absolutely no reason for this to have a running time of 122 minutes, especially when the first half makes its point inside about ten, and then sits there, as if waiting for a bus. It’s a particular issue, because it’s only the second half where things get adequately interesting. You will need a great deal of patience – or, probably more likely, some household chores to take care of – in order to reach that point.

The heroine is Kacee Rhona (Beckly), an irascible FBI agent with a long history of disciplinary issues, going back to her days at Quantico. It’s perhaps not surprising, considering her childhood was a hellish landscape of abuse, from which she barely escaped at all, only after defending herself against her biological father. You do wonder how someone with such obvious psychological issues was accepted into the FBI, but whatevs. Seems she’s quite good at her job, and is now hot on the trail of a serial killer, Montague (Anderson) who has been kidnapping, raping and murdering (not necessarily in that order) a slew of women. It’s largely your standard “loose cannon with issues” thriller, with which we’re all (overly) familiar. While Beckly is… okay, the rest of the cast are well short of convincing, and the production’s resources are insufficient for what it’s trying to do.

Then, however, the killer brutally attacks Agent Rhona, leaving her literally dead for several minutes, and causing something inside her to snap. She becomes a vigilante while officially on sick leave, targetting those whom the law has not been able to punish. And who better to become a serial killer of serial killers, than someone trained to catch serial killers? It’s a bit like an unhinged, female version of Dexter, and is an awesome concept. Her colleagues are… well, for obvious reasons, somewhat ambivalent about this, when their suspicions are drawn towards one of their own kind. On the other hand, Rhona’s operation outside the law has its advantages, especially with Montague still on the loose.

I’d love to see this given the production it deserves, with a better supporting cast, and elements that accurately reflect the supposed FBI setting, which never reaches even “unconvincing”. It feels like a nicely twisted take on Silence of the Lambs, and I could imagine a young Jodie Foster or Angelina Jolie in the role of the heroine. But any remake would also need to go at the script with a pair of garden shears, removing all the extraneous nonsense which drags the front hour down to an uninteresting crawl. There was eventually marginally enough here to keep me going, yet I’d not blame anyone if they chose to cut their losses before that point.

Dir: Michael Fredianelli
Star: Stacy Beckly, Derek Crowe, Kevin Karrick, Jaren Anderson

Hyde

  By

★★½
“Hyde and sick”

This gets off to an impressive and intriguing start. Cora Fisher (Pribilski) has a perfectly normal life. Then, she’s involved in a car crash. The next thing she knows, she wakes up in a hospital bed. Oh, to which she is handcuffed. Before she can come to terms with that, she is informed that ten years have passed. And completing the triple-whammy, Texas Ranger Jim Krueger (Llorens) enters, and tells Cora he’s going to make sure she gets the death penalty for the murders she committed. It’s safe to say, the movie has successfully gained my attention by this point. Guided by mysterious cellphone texts, Cora escapes the hotel and goes on the run, seeking to find out the truth about what happened. 

It would be almost impossible for any film to live up to what is a cracking opening 20 minutes. You’ll perhaps have guessed from the star rating above, this certainly doesn’t. Part of the problem is the decision to leave Cora, when simply experiencing proceedings from her perspective would perhaps have been best, the audience discovering her past alongside her. Instead, it diverts into considerably less interesting areas, such as following Krueger. You’ll be forgiven if you’re making gestures towards your television set, trying to guide the plot back towards the heroine. The other problem is, when it does eventually get back there and resolution is obtained, the answer is considerably less interesting than the question. For spoiler reasons, I won’t go into detail, but it fell short of convincing to me.

I think the script ends up being pulled in too many different directions, and us not being able to do justice to many of them. For instance, there’s an odd Purge vibe, with people in masks, going round killing people with apparent immunity. It’s an angle that doesn’t seem to fit the psychological slant to much of the proceedings, and nor does it particularly appear to add extra value. The film is technically solid, and Pribilski does well enough in a role that must have been a dramatically challenging experience. The rest of the cast are largely functional. It does feel they are more like plot devices made flesh, there to move the story along.

But in the end, it is that story which represents the movie’s biggest problem. I’m always dubious about amnesia as a device. It often feels a lazy way for film-makers to generate mystery, which can then be equally easily solved by the protagonist miraculously remembering things again, as and when needed by the plot. This is a good example of that: without the convenient medical condition, the movie would have been over in about ten minutes. If you’re going to use it, the payoff has to be adequate for the disbelief you ask the audience to suspend. That definitely isn’t the case here and, despite some positives, this founders as a result, and struggles to make it over the finish line. 

Dir: Dallas Burgess
Star: Kelsey Pribilski, Chip Llorens, Avi Lake, Diana Rose

Burn It All

  By

★★
“Ashes to asses.”

I will say, I did actually enjoy this rather more than the rating above indicates. For pure entertainment value, it’s a 3 to 3½-star entity, when watched as a brutal parody of new feminism. The problem is, I don’t think those involved with it were making a parody. As a serious statement about gender, it’s almost impossible to take seriously. Alexandra Nelson (Cotter) is at the end of her tether, when she gets a call that her long-estranged mother is dying. Driving home to pick up the body, she finds it being hustled out the back of the crematorium. Turns out to be part of an organ harvesting scheme, run by the local crime bosses. This gives Alex something to live for, and she begins a one-woman campaign to take down the perpetrators. But that’s a mission which will drag in her estranged sister, bikini barista Jenny (Gately), into peril as Alex’s targets respond to her actions.

There’s a decent idea here, and in stuntwoman Cotter, a lead actress capable of delivering the necessary brutality. The action is pretty good, with an impact in excess of the usual low-budget entries. The problem is a genuinely terrible script, with Alex going from suicidal to unstoppable avenging angel at the drop of a mother she hasn’t talked to in years. It also needs more background for her remarkable ass-kicking than a spell in basic training, in order to justify the ease with which she takes down multiple opponents, close to double her weight. But then, if they’d done that, then Alex’s lifetime Gold Level membership in the Victim Club would have been jeopardized; why submit to the patriarchy in every avenue of life, when you could just have beaten it up? Because the story needs her to be both victim and victor – an awkward contradiction it fails miserably to address. Though even this could have been worked around, if she’d let her actions do the talking.

However, Alex is a mouthy bitch, to put it mildly. No fight is complete, unless preceded by a lengthy debate with her male target, which inevitably ends in them getting angry at her speaking “truth to power”. All the men in this are sexist pigs. Every. Single. One. Even the toddler, or the random guy passing her car on the freeway. It’s a ludicrously shallow approach, which you know will be lacking in nuance from the moment someone unironically uses the word “libtard.” After repeated comparisons of guns to penises, hysterical laughter is the only credible reaction when Alex comes out with arguably the most supremely cheesy pseudo-feminist line of all time, snarling, “Anything you can do, I can do bleeding”. I’m sure there are viewers, likely those who live on Twitter and Reddit, who might believe this to be a documentary. Anyone with an ounce of sense though, may well wonder how much its heroine’s obvious hair-trigger caused, rather than solve, her many issues.

Dir: Brady Hall
Star: Elizabeth Cotter, Emily Gateley, Ryan Postell, Elena Flory-Barnes

The 355

  By

★★★
“Mission reasonably possible”

I went into this preparing to hate it. There had been red flags all over the place, such as star and producer Chastain coming out with comments about her movie like, “It’s very important for society. We’ve moved against the status quo, and we’re creating our own narrative for it. The film is, in some sense, a political act.” Uh-oh. No film is ever “very important for society.” It’s a film. The good news, however, is this is perfectly watchable without worrying about such things. While it may have been created as a female-led story, it’s much more identifiable as a generic spy romp, in which the protagonists roam the world in pursuit of some threatening item, on which the bad guys want to get their hands. Hooray for the equality of mediocrity!

In this case, Item X is a black box that lets its owner do anything at all on the Internet, from hacking emails to crashing planes. It was found in a raid on a Colombian drug lord’s lair, where it came into possession of a soldier who now wants to sell it. Initially, a deal is brokered to sell it to the CIA, and agent “Mace” Browne (Chastain) is sent to Paris to complete the transaction. However, the meeting goes badly wrong, so Browne has to team up with a United Nations of other intelligence operatives, to stop it falling into the wrong hands, which could bring about unspeakable horrors. Such as nobody being able to post their thoughts on Twitter.

It’s all rather predictable, and quite remarkable how, after being cut off by the CIA, Mace is still able to commandeer aircraft and whatever other resources she needs. As the tagline above suggests, it’s all more than a bit evocative of another spy franchise in tone, though in most ways, feels like a Good Value version thereof. Chastain isn’t quite Tom Cruise; Nyong’o isn’t Simon Pegg; and so on. There’s not a great deal of emotion to be found either. The only one who feels properly human is Cruz, and her character is a psychiatrist, unfortunately entangled in the operation, rather than a field agent. The others feel more like high-functioning AIs, programmed to do their jobs.

The action scenes, however, are thoroughly professional and well-staged. There are some early chases around Paris which are approaching top tier, and plenty of bullet-spraying action for the finale. Though Chris has asked me to inform you that, if you have a hand-to-hand fight on a balcony, the rules of action cinema require someone to go over the edge. She was disappointed by the wilful disregard to tradition shown here. In general though, this was acceptable entertainment, and outside of a couple of sentences of dialogue, did not seem obviously preachy. That title, however: painfully obscure, and not explained until far too late. Still, this likely did not deserve the dismal box-office fate which it suffered. Perhaps the audience’s refusal to buy tickets to see it was, in some sense, a political act?

Dir: Simon Kinberg
Star: Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o

Violet

  By

★★
“Love the poster. The film? Not so much.”

There’s a decent idea here, and an attempt to add some new wrinkles to that old reliable, the rape-revenge genre. Unfortunately, there are too many problems and missteps to make this a worthwhile entry. Violet (Winkler) is an aspiring actress, whose dreams are shattered when she falls for a fake audition. She is lured into a basement, raped, and the resulting footage posted on a highly-dubious website. She’s clearly broken by the trauma, to the increasing worry of her mother (Burns). But hope is present in her growing relationship with Josh (Crowe), a young man she met at the lake where Violet likes to sit, trying to find some measure of peace. However, how will he react when he finds out about her other life, in which she is making those responsible for the assault, pay.

The main theme this seeks to illustrate, appears to be the proverb about revenge and digging two graves. There’s not much uplifting about the process through which Violet goes, and you’d be hard pushed to argue that, at the end, she finds herself in a better place. She may have made her attackers regret what they did, in no uncertain fashion. [Ironically, she posts the resulting videos on the same site, and acquires a bit of a cult following as a result.] However, it doesn’t fix the problem: her thespian ambitions, for example, can never be restored to what they were. Indeed, there turns out to be a high price to be paid, though it has to be said, this results from one of the more unlikely plot twists I can remember.

That development is just one of the problems with this, which managed to keep taking me out of the narrative, just when it seemed to be pulling me in. For example, Violet’s “mother” looks, acts and sounds about three years old than the 21-year-old heroine, and is so unconvincing in this role, she sticks out like a sore thumb. The extended chit-chat between Josh and Violet also rarely surpasses the level of of his self-composed poems. At least they nailed the bad teenage verse aspect: I literally LOL’d at his rhyming of “shoulder” with “boulder”.

I’m not sure about Winkler’s performance, which is hurt by inconsistency. There are points when she seemed thoroughly believable, selling the pain of her experiences. Yet, two minutes later, it was as if a switch had been flipped and no trace of the trauma could be seen. While that may have been a deliberate dramatic choice, it feels false. I did appreciate, however, the decision to leave the rape almost unportrayed. We see only a fraction of the resulting video on the Internet, and I’m fine with that. I’ve always been about the revenge, and that doesn’t feel any less justified as a result of that choice. Overall though, it doesn’t mess sufficiently well to deliver the necessary impact.

Dir: Samuel Vainisi
Star: Alyss Winkler, Jason Crowe, Ember Burns, Keith Voigt Jr.