Tag: USA

SheChotic

  By

★½
“You’ll need a break.”

Within about two minutes of starting this, I realized I had made a terrible mistake, and was watching something barely reaching the amateur level of film production. Still, I soldiered on – albeit for some loose definition of “soldiered” – until the bitter end, mostly so I could issue an informed warning about this to any prospective viewers. Maxine (Mitchell) is rather upset when she discovers her boyfriend, music video producer Lance (Watts) has been cheating on her with Lana (Bryant). Mind you, she’s clearly a bit unhinged already: for example, telling him she’s pregnant when she isn’t. So it’s not much of a surprise when her reaction to his two-timing is to kidnap Lance, tie him up in her basement and submit him to various indignities, along with seeking revenge on Lana. Which, apparently, includes sleeping with her father (Walker).

If this all sounds like completely ludicrous and implausible nonsense… I have done my job as a reviewer, because that’s exactly what it is, buttressed by poor audio quality, questionable directorial decisions (the conversation where the camera spins around the participants like a hyperactive house-fly was an especially dubious choice) and a final twist which managed to be both out of left field and entirely predictable at the same time. About the only thing which I did quite like, was the way Maxine’s personality splits into two distinct characters. One is urging her on to do ever more malicious deeds, while the other is trying to take a higher moral path. Surprisingly – considering the ineptness everywhere else – it’s decently handled on both sides of the camera. Even if I doubt anyone ever thought, “I want an erotic thriller which largely avoids actually nudity, with a black, female version of Gollum in it,” this aspect is likely responsible for this avoiding a dreaded and rarely awarded one-star rating.

I was amused by the po-faced disclaimer from the director which opens this: “Due to my strong convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses support of violence, abuse against women or other subject matter that may be considered offensive.” Several points come to mind. Firstly, if you have to add a disclaimer to your film like that, you’re doing it wrong. Secondly, it’s little more than empty virtue signaling anyway: It’d be far more notable if a director stated “I wholeheartedly endorse violence.” Thirdly, any abuse here is far more by women: what is Mr. Fiori’s stance on that? Sadly, it appears we will never know, save for the unlikely event of there being a SheChotic 2. Fourthly and finally, it’s never a good sign when the text which starts your movie is worthy of deeper analysis and commentary than 95% of what follows it. Though if it had instead simply read, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” it would certainly have been equally valid.

Dir: Leandre Fiori
Star: Erica Mitchell, Robert D Watts, Brittany Bryant, Jason Walker

Truck Stop Women

  By

★★★
“Blood is thicker than water. But gasoline is thicker still.”

Ostensibly, Anna (Dressler) runs a New Mexico truck-stop, catering to drivers and ensuring they are kept fed and watered as they run their rigs across country. However, she has several more lucrative businesses. It seems that a majority of her waitresses, for example, moonlight as hookers in the brothel Anna runs. But the key side-line of work is sending her gals out to lure in unsuspecting truckers, typically with an alluring combination of fake breakdowns and tight shorts. When the truckers stop, their vehicles are hijacked, the contents stolen and the trucks themselves repainted and sold on.

It’s this which brings Anna to the attention of the East coast mafia, who send over a couple of goons to muscle in and make Anna an offer she can’t refuse. Not helping matters, Anna’s daughter, Rose (Jennings), is tired of being Mom’s servant, and wants her independence, so hooks up with Smith (Martino), one of the goons. When Anna gets word of a truck carrying bearer bonds passing through her territory, she starts to plan her biggest heist ever. But can Rose be trusted to play her part? Or will she be prepared to sacrifice her own family, in order to exchange roadside life in New Mexico for the bright, big city lights of Las Vegas?

This is generally a brisk, breezy film, which managed to beat Convoy to the punch by four years. The soundtrack is pure country-and-western cheese, songs about the joys of trucks and trucking, and relentlessly upbeat [performed by Bobby Hart, at the time Claudia Jennings’s boyfriend]. This becomes horribly inappropriate at the film’s end: without spoiling it, there’s the death of one major character, and we immediately cut to the end credits, playing out over yet another relentlessly upbeat song about the joys of trucks and trucking. Ouch. In general though, this is entertaining nonsense. It’s particularly notable for the way it portrays working class Southern rednecks in a generally positive way. Ok, outside of the whole “career criminal” thing. For they are depicted as smart – Anna especially –  and certainly more moral than the mob muscle, who are trigger-happy from the very opening scene.

Things are spearheaded by the presence of B-movie queen Jennings, already present on this site for The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, Unholy Rollers and ‘Gator Bait. Though getting less screen-time than her mom,. Rose is the highly watchable centre around which the plot revolves. For you’re never quite sure where her loyalties lie, right up until the final scene. Is she passing information from Anna to the mafia? Or the other way round? Or both? Throw in a healthy amount of female nudity (not least notably from Russ Meyer favorite Uschi Digard) and you’ve got a film which, if unable to spell the word “subtlety”, couldn’t be much more drive-in if it tried.

Fun fact: this film played a role in wrecking the presidential aspirations of Texas senator Phil Gramm in 1995. It came out that  in the seventies he had become “interested in investing in what he called ‘sexploitation’ films after a private viewing of the film.” Yeah, Jennings had that effect on a lot of people.

Dir: Mark L. Lester
Star: Lieux Dressler, Claudia Jennings, Dennis Fimple, John Martino

Pickings

  By

★★
“Pap fiction.”

I am not a fan of Quentin Tarantino, outside of Kill Bill. Even as early as Reservoir Dogs, I found his style to be self-indulgent, and could never hear his characters speaking in their own voices, only QT’s. He seems to be capable only of cobbling together elements and influences from obscure, yet generally superior movies, and sprinkling them with pop-culture riffs and dialogue that’s so fake-sounding and artificial, it needs a warning label. So, while I appreciate the irony of someone ripping off the master of rip-off cinema, as Morgan does here, it’s not a world into which I willingly travel.

The influence here is palpable from the opening scene, when bar owner Jo Lee-Haywood (Price) is interrogating a thug she has captured and, it turns out, is tied up in a backroom of the bar she runs. Jo ends up talking about motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and how everyone is motivated by pleasure or fear, in a speech which couldn’t be more Quentin Tarantino, if it were licking the heroine’s bare feet. More or less from then on, it seemed painfully apparent this was the kind of film I was going to have to endure, rather than enjoy. And that was largely correct.

Jo, it turns out, is in debt to some rather nasty people, in particular a gangster named Sam “Hollywood” Barone (Urbas). He sends his henchmen to make Jo and her daughter, Scarlet (Vincent), an offer they can’t refuse, involving handing over the bar. Only, Jo is all, “Nah, we’re good, thanks,” and is having none of it. For she is not exactly the innocent bar-owner she seems, but came to the small Michigan town in order to escape a particularly brutal past. This isn’t her first time at the crime rodeo, shall we say – as we find out via another Tarantino-esque device, the needlessly convoluted time-line.

Morgan also appears to be a fan of Sin City, throwing in stylistic flourishes such as switching to rotoscoped animation at random. Most of these are more aggrandisements than art, save for Hollywood always being depicted in black-and-white. That’s a great way of indicating his status as a character straight out of film noir. The rest, though? Style for the sake of it, down to the cribbing of musical cues lifted from Morricone scored spaghetti Westerns, and a character who seems to have wandered straight off those same dusty streets. 

And it’s a shame, as in Jo, the film has a character which could have been a classic – even if the whole “left in a coma” thing is also cribbed from a certain QT film you’ve probably seen. Price plays her character like a velvet glove cast in iron (that’s one cult film not referenced!), and it soon becomes apparent that, when it comes to protecting Scarlet, Jo has no limits. Exploring this aspect, rather than making both story-line and players subservient to the movie’s look and feel, would have helped avoid this coming over like a fan submission to TarantinoCon 2018.

Dir: Usher Morgan
Star: Elyse Price, Yaron Urbas, Katie Vincent, Joe Trombino

Immortal Wars: Resurgence

  By

★★
“Let there be light!”

First, the good news. Whatever the issue was with its predecessor in the lighting department, it has been corrected. You can actually see what is going on. After spending the entire previous movie peering into murky darkness, trying to work out who was doing what and to whom, this was a blessed relied. Now, the bad news: it still falls some way short of interesting, so merits a mere half-star advance. Indeed, if anything, it’s a bit more tedious, not least because it clocks in at 112 minutes, without having anything like 112 minutes of content.

It does carry on immediately from Immortal Wars, so you might as well consider them as one single movie – watching one or the other would not provide anything close to a complete experience. Heroine Trikalypse (Gerhardy) continues her revolt against the evil Dominion Harvey (Roberts), with the help of her fellow rebel “deviants” – those who possess special powers. Apparently, this involves her escaping from Dominion’s facility… purely so she can break back into it. Not sure what that was all about. It certainly explains the expanded running time, with a lot of traipsing about, both through tunnels and across the (mercifully, well-lit!) desert, as Dominion’s henchwoman Hart (Alayne) tries to stop them.

There is no shortage of action, admittedly. It just isn’t very well-executed action, and for supposedly superpowered mutants, they seem to keep forgetting to use their superpowers much. We also discover the whole “fight to the death” thing from the first film was more true in the spirit than the actual observance, with Trikalypse’s BFF Iro not exactly as deceased as we were led to believe. Of course, as the rebels fight their way towards the inevitable confrontation between Trikalypse and Dominion, there are casualties, though it would be a stretch to say that any of them provided an emotional impact.

It’s all very predictable, such as the way that Dominion, despite his claimed aversion to deviants, has his own platoon of them. Yet, for someone who supposedly rules the entire United States, he can only apparently command a couple of dozen people. His actions also defy simple logic. If ever I become an evil overlord, and know the precise location of a group of my enemies who are coming to attack me, I will not send out a henchwoman to engage in banter and hand-to-hand combat. I’m taking off and nuking the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure…

And, again: Bill Oberst is listed second in the credits, yet barely appears. [He may not appear at all, but I did genuinely doze off for a bit in the middle, so can’t be 100% sure] At least this time, Lujan does have the good grace to provide something of a satisfactory conclusion: another area in which it does improve on the first part. Overall though, the plodding nature of the core narrative largely negates these improvements, and combined with the extended duration, you’re left with something which you need to be in a highly forgiving mood to sit through.

Dir: Joe Lujan
Star: Jackie Gerhardy, Eric Roberts, Ben Stobber, Camille Alayne 

Hooker With a Hacksaw

  By

★★
“Great title. Film? Not so much.”

There are times when I feel I need a ★¾ rating. Two stars here would suggest a degree of genuine competence, which this undeniably lacks. But on the other hand, ★½ suggests something which is largely unmemorable, and that isn’t the case either. You won’t forget this. In particular, you won’t forget the scene where the heroine yanks some (suspiciously sausagey) intestines out of a victim, rubs them over her face and then – there’s no other way to describe this – masturbates the intestines. That’s three words I never thought I would write in a row. On that basis (and that basis alone), I’ll err on the side of generous.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. S’funny, you wait ages for a movie about a phone-sex operator turned vigilante, and then two show up in a week. For after Barracuda, we get this  – despite the title, that’s the true day-job of Kirsten (Meltedhair, and I’m gonna go out on a limb here, presuming that’s a pseudonym). The problems do start when she agrees to meet one of her customers, which eventually brings her into contact with Raymond (Crowe) and his gang of ludicrously incompetent snuff-movie producers. After escaping from them, she tools up with the titular bit of hardware and vows to take revenge – especially after they kidnap her BFF, Ali (Herkert). As well as on any other abusers of women across whom she stumbles.

Farmer has been making cheap video flicks for over thirty years now, but on the evidence of this, he doesn’t seem to have learned much. Vast swathes of it are empty and meaningless padding, e.g. Kirsten goes to a “drive-in”. This sequence apparently exists purely so Farmer can insert footage of scream queen Linnea Quigley, going by her age, taken from a long-ago Donald Farmer movie. And it’s pretty clear Kirsten was just parked by the side of the road, not in an actual drive-in. So why bother, even if it does provide the only actual nudity here. For despite her supposed occupation, Ms. Meltedhair is clearly a serious actress, unwilling to pop her top for a cheap exploitation flick like this. I’ll leave the application of the appropriate amount of sarcasm to you.

Though, actually, she’s probably the best thing about this, not that it’s saying particular much. Kirsten has a likeable personality, once you get past a prickly exterior. And, in contrast to the heroine in Barracuda, she is justified in her vengeful actions, even if Raymond is never more than a caricature. When present, the gore is copious, yet also so amateurish to be much more amusing than horrific, and to the film’s credit, I think that this aspect is intentional. However, there’s far too much dead weight in the scenes between, for this to come close to passing muster. Any potential in the idea is all but entirely squandered, and even at a terse 70 minutes, this outstays its welcome. Hobo With a Shotgun, it most definitely is not.

Dir: Donald Farmer + Caroline Kopko
Star: Kasper Meltedhair, Jason Crowe, Colleen Herkert, Steve Guynn

Immortal Wars

  By

★½
“Batteries not included.”

For whatever reason – presumably misguided stylistic reasons – the great bulk of the film is buried in darkness. Seriously, three-quarters of the film feels like it’s illuminated solely by natural lighting. And given it mostly takes place underground, in rooms with no windows, this is a major problem. The movie reaches its literally darkest moment during an early scene where the camera pans over an underlit set to an even more underlit door where someone has entered to deliver a message. You cannot see who it is. You just hear a disembodied voice, before the camera pans back. It’s a horrible mis-step, whether due to poor shooting, a poor transfer, or a bit of both. It largely dooms the movie, to the point where even an energetic final third is unable to rescue proceedings. For how can you begin to enjoy something you can’t see?

The story takes place in a future world, now divided into ten sectors. A small fraction of the population, known as “deviants”, have developed superpowers, becoming the subject of fear and hatred by regular humans. For popular amusement, there’s an annual competition in which each of the ten sectors capture and nominate their top fighting deviant. They are then taken to a central location and made to battle each other to the death, in a globally-televised contest run by Dominion Harvey (Roberts), which is watched by just about everyone else. So, basically: The Hunger Games crossed with X-Men. On a very, very much smaller budget.

The main heroine is Trikalypse (Gerhardy), one of the ten combatants taking part in this year’s model. Though for the first hour, it’s more chatty, as she bonds with another of the fighters – inevitably, of course, one she ends up fighting later on. But it is refreshingly female-oriented, with both of the finalists being women, as well as the super-boss that the winner then has to take on. However, the film then ends – literally going to the end-credits – just as that fight starts. Fortunately, I didn’t watch this until after the sequel was also available, otherwise I would have been very annoyed. It’s the sort of cliff-hanger you expect from a free e-book on Amazon, not an actual feature film.

Despite the lack of originality, it’s a decent concept and I’d have forgiven this, if the fights had actually been better than mediocre. Instead, as well as the lighting problem, they’re not very well-choreographed, though do have occasional moments which are somewhat effective. I was most impressed with Cruz as bad bitch Dekay, who had the presence, the look and the apparent skills, to keep me at least somewhat interested. But this was small consolation for something which, far too often, crossed the boundary into being genuinely unwatchable. It even managed to waste the talents of Bill Oberst, who shows up for exactly one scene – though at least that’s in daylight – while Tom Sizemore also manages to cameo his way through the darkness. I’m not exactly eagerly looking forward to the sequel, but it’s there…

Dir: Joe Lujan
Star: Jackie Gerhardy, Lindsey Cruz, Eric Roberts, Taylor Kilgore

Barracuda

  By

★★
“Nice car. Shame about the film.”

Struggling artist Summer (Oldham) takes on a temporary job as a phone-sex operator to make ends meet. It gives her a very jaundiced view of men, having had to plunge into the worst and most sordid depths of their fantasies. After realizing that some pose a more direct threat, and funded by hush money from one of her customers, she buys the car of the title. and takes their information, along with the tapes she has recorded of them, on a little road-trip across the South and West of America. She’s heading towards her sister (Hinchley), bringing the perverts to justice as she goes, and seeking closure for her own past.

Technically, this is actually pretty good. It looks crisp, and even as someone whose interest in cars is limited to viewings of The Grand Tour, the Barracuda is an awesome vehicle. [I guess the movie’s budget didn’t stretch to licensing the Heart song. It would have been appropriate, with lyrics such as: “If the real thing don’t do the trick/You better make up something quick/You gonna burn, burn, burn, burn, burn to the wick/Oooo, Barracuda,”] However, the script and overall attitude is an endless series of misfires and jarring shifts in tone. Overall, it’s less empowering than self-indulgent and man-hating wish-fulfillment.

Oldham – who co-wrote and co-directed this, as well as starring in it – appears to be working through some issues. May I suggest therapy, rather than film-making? Because this kind of half-baked nonsense seems unlikely to help anyone. The script has holes you could drive the Barracuda through. Apparently, phone-sex lines require customers to provide their real names and home addresses to the operators; while the cops stand poised, ready to sweep immediately into action on receipt of an anonymous cassette. I could probably have got past most of this, if the film had fully embraced its inner darkness. Instead, we get abysmal efforts at “humour” – quotes used advisedly – such as someone smashing a cake into their own face. To quote the master of sarcasm, Edmund Blackadder: “I thank God I wore my corset, because I think my sides have split.”

The relentless parade of male caricatures quickly gets old, too, and don’t get me started on the feeble efforts at political commentary, or the surprisingly (for a film so proudly “woke”) casual racism. Of course, I stand diametrically opposed to the basic concept here. I fully endorse fantasy of any kind, however dark or sordid they may seem. Acting on them is entirely another thing, of course. But that’s not something which is an issue for the vast majority of men. Instead, they offer a safe escape-valve, and are something which should be encouraged rather than, as here, meriting punishment. That’s basically thoughtcrime – though I guess that’s par for the course these days. Rarely have I been so irritated by a film. Fortunately, it’s not one capable of leaving any permanent impression.

Dir: Christy Oldham, Shane Woodson
Star: Christy Oldham, Pippa Hinchley, Kaden Grave

Pussy Kills

  By

★★
“Coughs up a hairball.”

Despite a startling cover, this isn’t as sleazy as it seems. Indeed, even the title appears to be erring on the side of restraint, having apparently avoided the more obvious (and arguably, accurate) one of Killer Pussy. While the heroine certainly has an… interesting choice of costume, that’s as far as the film wants to go. It’s an odd approach: a sleeve like that sets up certain sets of expectations, which the movie has no apparent interest in matching. It’s not as if anyone of a sensitive nature is going to have got past the cover, so it seems odd to exercise such self-discipline when it comes to the content.

Anyway, it’s the story of Susie (Maya), whose parents were killed in a gang-related incident. Although both she and the cops know who was responsible, there isn’t enough evidence for the police to do anything. As a result, Susie begins her own surveillance operation, just before Halloween, only for the subjects to spot her. She is captured and raped by the gang, causing her already fragile sanity to crack. She manages to escape, and takes on the alternate persona of Pussy, her “sexy pussycat” Halloween costume. Wearing it, she tracks down the members of the gang who raped her, as well as their associates, and offs them in a variety of ways. She begins with some enthusiastic axe-work, then graduates to strangulation with a shoe-lace, and so on. But neither the gang nor the cops are enthusiastic about the corpses left in Pussy’s wake.

If only Catwoman had been like this. Well, if only this had had the budget of Catwoman, then it might have helped. At least, it might not have been a case where all the violence seems to occur just off-screen, accompanied by sprays of digital blood. You want to see vengeful savagery done properly? I Spit on Your Grave 3. There’s precious little sense of escalation or progress here, so for a good 45 minutes, it’s just one uninteresting kill after another. It may have started life as a web series, which may explain this over-episodic approach.

Still,  you’re clearly doing something wrong, when even Maya’s undeniably appealing butt begins to lose its charms… [Eventually… Probably after murder seven or so] Things do get slightly more interesting down the stretch, with the gang kidnapping Susie’s husband (Jia). There’s actually some drive to the narrative, rather than it being not much more than a loosely connected series of murders, intercut with shots of its leading lady’s booty. But even to reach that point, you also have to sit through the garish early going, where Black appears to be swapping lens filters on almost every shot, turning those scenes into a lurid, kaleidoscopic nightmare. When a director has to apply so much style, that’s usually an indication they have little or no confidence in the substance of their work. In this case, such concerns are largely justified.

Dir: Gabriel Black
Star: Lina Maya, Izzy Martinez, Kraig Million, Dave Jia

Blow a Kiss

  By

★★½
“Too little, too late.”

You could skip the first 30-45 minutes of this, and it really would not affect your enjoyment level significantly. It seems to be one of those cases where the director is far more in love with the dialogue and characters than they deserves, and so we have to sit through far too much flapping of jaws by the latter, delivering the former in inane and uninteresting conversation, before we get to the meat of the story. Which is, as follows.

Homeless, failed ballerina Joy Malone (Berkshire), who just lost custody of her child, is drowning her sorrows in a dive bar, when she encounters local meth dealer, Samantha (Tutor), who offers her a way out of her dire straits. For Sam is in a war with another dealer, Marcus Mitchell (Martinez), and needs a replacement killer after having recently discovered – in the bar’s bathroom – that one of her gang was actually working for the opposition. Sam offers to pay Joy all the money she needs to get her kid back. All she has to do is kill Mitchell. Of course, it’s never as easy as that.

I’ve not heard of Mauser, but turns out he’s a prolific film-maker, whose site lists Kiss as his 37th (!) feature. That’s impressive, almost regardless of quality. And it’s possible this might have appealed more if I’d seen the previous 36. For instance, I suspect the presence of a psychotic killer in a giant bunny costume here, is a nod to his Serial Rabbit franchise, which has reached five movies. [Who knew?] On its own, though, there wasn’t enough to sustain my interest. For example, while I’m always down for an all-girl gang, we first meet the one here in an extended interrogation sequence, trying to extract Mitchell’s location from one of his henchmen. I suspect this is trying to be Tarantino-esque. It is – only in that it’s incredibly annoying and self-indulgent.

Just when I was close to giving up on this entirely as a flick which didn’t require a microscope to detect any entertainment value… Joy and Sam connect, and the rest of the film is actually not too bad, for a low-budget romp. There are a couple of ways I thought this might go: the striking red hair of both Sam and Joy seemed so consciously similar, I expected some kind of impersonation twist. Instead, it’s just Joy having to make her way up against Mitchell – at least until the truth is revealed.

Avoiding spoilers for that last section, means I can’t say too much about the finale, which is probably the best, and certainly the most energetic (read: least chatty), part of proceedings. I did also like the way what appears to be a police interview of Joy in the wake of everything, turns out to be… not quite that. However, you need just too much patience to get to the decent stuff, and I certainly wouldn’t blame anyone who cut and ran after the first half-hour.

Dir: Brett William Mauser
Star: Dane Berkshire, Cassandra Tutor, Karen Roberge, Ernest Martinez

Life Blood

  By

★★½
“Still a better love story than Twilight“

There’s a fascinating idea at the core here. Namely, that vampires were created by God, in order to mitigate mankind’s sin by preying on the most evil examples of humanity. They’re effectively angelic enforcers. The potential in this is great. The execution, however… Well, it largely comes down to two such vampire/angels sitting around a gas station for the majority of the running time. This isn’t the only aspect which is poorly considered. It starts in 1969, when lesbian couple Brooke (Lahiri) and Rhea (Monk) are at a New Year’s party. Brooke kills a rapist, stabbing him (literally) 87 times, and the pair then flee. In the desert, they are visited by God (model Angela Lindvall), who makes Rhea into one of her enforcers.

However, Rhea insists Brooke gets the same treatment. You’d think God, with all that infallibility and omniscience might figure out giving such power to someone who just stabbed someone (I repeat, literally) 87 times, might not be a good idea. But, whatevs. The pair then lie dormant in the desert sands for forty years, because… Er, I dunno. Reasons? Eventually surfacing, Brooke revels in her new found abilities and quickly turns them to murderous ends, while Rhea tries to restrain her lover, being more in the “with great power comes great responsibility” camp. God, meanwhile, is apparently otherwise engaged, probably writing a monograph on free will.

After Brooke has offed her first victim, an unfortunately passing hitch-hiker, they hijack a camper and hole up in the gas station mentioned. This is necessary in order to avoid daylight, which in this version, still has that unfortunate effect on vampires; quite why God didn’t address that in her wisdom is also unexplained. There, they are eventually located by local police officer, Sheriff Tillman (cult legend Napier), who has followed the trail of mayhem. Rhea is going to have to decide whether to stand with Brooke, or go against her.

It gets some of the little things right, and has an off-the-wall sensibility that’s kinda endearing, and rather trashy. For instance the Sherriff’s favourite TV show is Chicks Chasing Chickens, which is exactly what it sounds like, and is the most amusing fake TV show since Ow! My Balls! God turning up in an seethrough nightie from Victoria’s Secret was also… interesting. Lahiri seems to be having fun with her role too, all lip-gloss and gleeful violence.

Unfortunately, Lahiri is flat-out terrible – with the emphasis on “flat” – and the plot doesn’t have a clue what to do with itself for the middle hour [It may be relevant in terms of the apparent lack of plot direction, the original title was the inexplicable Pearblossom, then became Murder World before settling on the eventual title]. The two leads lurk around the gas-station, bickering with each other and the cashier (Renna, who could be a low-rent version of Sean Astin), while occasionally offing people who show up. It’s far short of enough, and leaves almost all that potential, sadly unfulfilled.

Dir: Ron Carlson
Star: Sophie Monk, Anya Lahiri, Charles Napier, Patrick Renna