Josh Bell
Drug smugglers, amateur pornographers, Spartan cosplayers, and foolhardy teens all take on ill-advised challenges in this week’s fringe VOD releases.
The Final Run (VOD and select theaters August 15): A former smuggler returns to his criminal ways for the world’s most uneventful drug run in this tension-free thriller. After serving nine years in prison, Pierce Butler (Jeff Fahey) has settled into a comfortable retirement, but he’s pulled back into action when he faces two clichéd movie crises, needing money for both his sick wife’s medical treatment and his foreclosure-threatened mortgage. He enlists the help of his law-student granddaughter Ella (Maddie Henderson), who’s surprisingly laid-back about getting involved in the international drug trade. The movie is so lethargic that it never feels like any of the characters are in danger, even though Pierce’s daughter is dating a DEA agent. Wavering Southern accent aside, Fahey makes for an appealing aging rogue, but the rest of the performances are stilted and vacant, including Judd Nelson as Pierce’s former law-enforcement nemesis. The slow-moving, choppily edited film doesn’t get around to the actual smuggling operation until it’s almost over, and by then both the characters and the audience have completely checked out. Grade: C-
Dawn Dusk (VOD August 15): The first 20 minutes of this documentary are essentially indistinguishable from a promotional campaign for fashion designer Chelli Look and her CHC luxury handbag brand. It’s no surprise that directors Sarah Blue Winslow and Jason Gerber come from an advertising background, as they lovingly showcase CHC’s products, complete with slick onscreen titles labeling each bespoke design. Then, Look’s talking-head interviews shift from discussing her passion for purses to recounting the tragedy of her sister’s murder, and Dawn Dusk takes on a deeper resonance. That resonance comes and goes, though, as the filmmakers continue to devote substantial time to Look’s underwhelming artisanal vision, complete with fawning testimonials from her interns. When she connects her past trauma to her artistic expression, Look comes across as sensitive and thoughtful, making a case for the value of handbags as genuine pieces of art. A long detour following Look as she studies leatherwork in Italy subsequently saps the film’s momentum, and the ad-copy platitudes eventually outweigh the personal reflections. Grade: C+
A Spartan Dream (VOD and select theaters August 15): Like many movie characters before him, Brad Cavallopoulos (Peter Bundic) travels to a quaint hamlet in a foreign land to carry out a coldly calculated business transaction, only to have his mission derailed by the charming local people and culture. That basic but sturdy storyline would have been sufficient to carry this small-scale Greece-set dramedy, but it’s overshadowed by muddled political subplots and a baffling swerve into magical realism. Greek-American Brad just wants to sell his late mother’s home, where his Uncle George (Nikos Tsergas) has been living rent-free for decades, financially burdening Brad and his father. It’s predictable but tolerable when Brad gets caught up in village celebrations and falls for Uncle George’s pretty young ward Gorgo (Georgia Mesariti). But Bundic’s performance is more creepy than endearing, and he becomes completely unhinged when Brad starts having visions of Spartan warriors and convinces the town’s mayor to mount an armed march on Athens. What starts out as annoyingly quirky turns into a big fat Greek mess. Grade: C
Custom (VOD August 19): When artists Harriet (Abigail Hardingham) and Jasper (Rowan Polonski) make a pitch to viewers of their OnlyFans-like channel to like, subscribe, and submit custom requests, it’s the first and only time anything straightforward occurs in writer-director Tiago Teixeira’s dreamlike horror movie. Soon Harriet and Jasper are engaging in occult rituals submitted by a mysterious client who contacts them via an ominous online portal and demands that they never watch the recordings they create on his vintage video camera. Of course they watch the footage, and of course that leads them into strange, often incomprehensible reveries of sexuality and violence. Jasper attempts to trace the origins of their sinister benefactor, but Teixeira isn’t interested in providing any answers. With its surreal imagery and obtuse plotting, Custom is sometimes evocatively weird and sometimes just frustrating. Teixeira aims for the Berberian Sound Studio of porn, and even though he falls short, he creates some striking moments in the process. Grade: B-
Whisper of the Witch (VOD and DVD/Blu-ray August 19): An English-language Russian production with entirely post-dubbed dialogue, this disjointed horror movie set in a generic nowheresville comes off like a simulacrum of human behavior, and not in a rewardingly unsettling way. The characters speak like aliens who are learning each word for the first time as they utter it, with an uncanny aversion to contractions. The plot is only slightly less stiff and awkward, focused on a standard-issue haunted mansion where a group of teens encounter a malevolent spirit. There are actually two groups of teens, decades apart, and the adult survivors of the first encounter find themselves caught up in a second incident, when the demon is released from its dormant state. The logistics are vague and ever-changing, and the timeline is often confusing, despite the dialogue consisting almost entirely of exposition. Director Serik Beyseu relies on tiresome jump scares, which he executes with uninspired competence. The result plays like a janky copy of a forgettable assembly-line American horror B-movie. Grade: D+
