Josh Bell
This week’s low-profile VOD releases tackle racial tensions in Australia, Georgia and New York City, while a film crew faces down gangsters and a social media influencer hunts for Bigfoot.
The Subject (VOD and select theaters October 22): Director Lanie Zipoy and screenwriter Chisa Hutchinson have a lot on their minds with their debut feature, and they can’t quite deliver all of it cohesively. Still, the movie is impressively ambitious, with some powerful moments and a surprisingly strong lead performance from Jason Biggs. He plays Phil Waterhouse, a white filmmaker who’s made his career on documentaries about underprivileged young Black men. Even as he’s working on a new HBO series and basking in awards and acclaim, he’s troubled by the death of his most recent film’s subject, which Phil himself caught on camera. At best, The Subject is a complex examination of both documentary ethics and white male privilege, via a protagonist who is equally narcissistic and sympathetic. But the movie is structurally disjointed, with early scenes and subplots that amount to nothing, and a final act that jettisons all other supporting characters in favor of a lengthy, overwrought showdown between Phil and his late subject’s mother (Aunjanue Ellis). Grade: B-
The Crickets Dance (VOD October 26): The legacy of slavery inspires a modern-day love story in this misguided mix of historical drama and Hallmark-style romance. Small-town Georgia lawyer Angie Lawrence (Kristen Renton) inherits a massive antebellum mansion, where she discovers a diary written in the 1860s by a previous inhabitant. The movie switches between time periods as Angie reads about the life of kind-hearted Southern lady Emmaline McGrath (KateLynn E. Newberry) and her daughter Annabeth. There’s an air of condescension to the movie’s treatment of race relations, especially as reading about the love that Emmaline and Annabeth have for their slaves seems to enhance Angie’s attraction to her hunky Black co-worker Andrew (Maurice Johnson). Andrew’s last name also not-so-coincidentally happens to be McGrath, and part of their courtship involves him assuring Angie that she isn’t racist. Somewhere in here is an innocuous message about tolerance and harmony, but it’s buried under the tone-deaf dialogue, sloppy historical detail and flat performances. Grade: C-
Bigfoot Famous (VOD November 2): A social media influencer whose influence is waning decides she needs a “collab” with Bigfoot to regain her following. Writer-directors Sam Milman and Peter Vass start out with some spot-on takedowns of viral videos, but Bigfoot Famous quickly loses its way, just as influencer Coley (Steph Barkley) gets lost in the woods. The improvisational comedy leads to haphazard plotting, including various developments that feel entirely arbitrary, especially whenever the story strays from the wilderness. The lighthearted jokes abruptly give way to darkness, and the filmmakers can’t pull off the tonal shifts. Barkley and Milman (as Coley’s long-suffering sidekick) provide amusing caricatures of self-involved influencers, and some of the absurdist humor is funny. Milman and Vass could have pushed that absurdism further, or they could have stuck with something more grounded, but the awkward mix eventually squanders all of the movie’s early comedic potential. Grade: C+
Nightshooters (VOD November 2): Marc Price’s lively action comedy opens with a pitch-perfect recreation of a low-budget zombie movie titled Dawn of the Deadly, for which a small crew is shooting a few pick-up shots in an abandoned building. Unfortunately for them, a group of mobsters is using the same building for a bit of torture and murder, and when the film crew’s cameras inadvertently capture that criminal activity, the hapless filmmakers are marked for death. What’s fun about Nightshooters is that the filmmakers actually aren’t as hapless as they seem, and Price cleverly applies their cinematic skills to fighting for their lives: The stunt performer is a martial-arts expert, the special effects supervisor can rig explosives, the sound designer improvises spy equipment, and the lead actor is really good at playing dead. Combining Die Hard, Home Alone and One Cut of the Dead, it’s an affectionate and entertaining tribute to scrappy independent filmmakers that also includes lots of kicking, punching and explosions. Grade: B+
The Flood (VOD and DVD November 2): There are a lot of somber onscreen dedications to indigenous people in this Australian period piece from writer-director Victoria Wharfe McIntyre, but the movie’s message is as muddled and confusing as its pacing. Set in the 1940s, The Flood is full of impressionistic flashbacks, dream sequences, and repetitions, eventually evolving into a rape-revenge thriller about a First Nations woman going after the cruel men who forcibly separated her family. It takes a lot of clunky set-up to get there, though, and McIntyre alternates between lyrical reflections and brutal violence, including multiple replays of a gang-rape scene. Star Alexis Lane looks fearsome as she goes on a rampage, but then the movie shifts gears again, attempting to become a parable of forgiveness. The result is a contradictory jumble of themes, ideas and characters that undermines any valuable points that McIntyre is trying to make about colonialism and racial hatred. Grade: C 
