{"id":23152,"date":"2024-04-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-23T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=23152"},"modified":"2024-04-22T19:03:45","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T02:03:45","slug":"vodepths-what-to-see-and-avoid-on-demand-this-week-86","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/vodepths-what-to-see-and-avoid-on-demand-this-week-86\/","title":{"rendered":"VODepths: What to See (and Avoid) on Demand This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week\u2019s minor VOD releases feature teenagers exploring their feelings via filmmaking and activism, plus a French-Canadian hitman, a kid with superpowers, and a talking handkerchief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dusk for a Hitman<\/em><\/strong> (VOD April 19):<\/strong> The second movie in the past year and a half to tell the true story of a French-Canadian mob enforcer-turned-informant in a style heavily indebted to Goodfellas<\/em>, director and co-writer Raymond St-Jean\u2019s film is a bit more stylish than 2022\u2019s Confessions of a Hitman<\/em><\/a>, but its lead character is less engaging. Donald Lavoie (\u00c9ric Bruneau) is an unrepentant killer who has no hesitation about offing anyone his boss Claude Dubois (Beno\u00eet Gouin) orders him to take out, including his own partners. Donald begrudgingly cooperates with the cops only after Dubois puts a bounty on him, and he seems to have no interest in justice or honor. That makes him tough to care about, despite Bruneau\u2019s gritty, often intense performance. The period detail of Montreal in the late 1970s and early 1980s is impressive, and St-Jean stages some suspenseful set pieces, but the scope of Dubois\u2019 criminal enterprise is vague, making both the betrayal and its aftermath somewhat rote and anticlimactic. Grade: B-<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hanky Panky<\/em><\/strong> (VOD April 19):<\/strong> Clearly everyone had a good time making this bonkers horror comedy that pits a sentient handkerchief against an evil alien hat, but that sense of fun only occasionally comes across. Mostly, directors Nick Roth and Lindsey Haun seem like they are frantically throwing in every ridiculous idea they could think of, and the result is more exhausting than amusing. Roth and Haun are both among the actors playing a group of friends spending a weekend at a remote snowbound cabin, where they start getting picked off one by one in familiar horror-movie fashion. The story eventually encompasses interdimensional beings, cult rituals, and hallucinogenic drugs, with a bunch of random pop-culture references (everyone is named after Cheers<\/em> characters, for some reason) that serve no purpose, narratively or comedically. The horny hanky voiced by Toby Bryan gets annoying quickly, and the human characters are only slightly less grating. The endearing \u201clet\u2019s put on a show\u201d energy only counts for so much. Grade: C<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Max Beyond<\/em> (VOD April 23):<\/strong> It\u2019s not nearly as insulting as it used to be to say that a movie looks like a video game, but most actual modern video games look better than this lifeless animated sci-fi debacle, which was created with video-game software Unreal Engine. In an undefined dystopian-ish future, a generically evil corporation is keeping superpowered kid Max Walker (Cade Tropeano) captive, to tap into his powers to access alternate realities. Max\u2019s older brother Leon (Dave Fennoy) comes to rescue him, and Max keeps shifting into new realities in search of one where Leon succeeds. That makes the basic plot repetitive and dull, but director and co-writer Hasraf \u201cHaZ\u201d Dulull can\u2019t rely on spectacle, since the animation is so hideous and ungainly. The plastic-looking characters are stuck with frozen, pained facial expressions, and no one ever seems to be touching the objects they\u2019re interacting with. It might be possible to overlook those flaws if you\u2019re immersed in gameplay, but as a passive viewer, it\u2019s hard to focus on anything else. Grade: D<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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