This week’s minor VOD releases go under the sea with an extreme athlete and a murderous mermaid, while also showcasing French pseudo-incest, 18th-century German literature, and a bargain-basement action hero.
Dick Dynamite: 1944 (Select theaters December 6; VOD December 10): After defensively opening with a disclaimer that it was a crowd-funded labor of love, this excruciating faux grindhouse movie delivers a grating “ironic” bad-movie experience that’s indistinguishable from genuine ineptitude. Mononymic star Snars attempts what sounds like an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression as the title character, a supposed military badass who’s assigned a suicide mission in the waning days of World War II, to destroy a secret Nazi superweapon. Imitating movies like The Dirty Dozen and Inglourious Basterds, writer-director Robbie Davidson puts together a team of equally annoying operatives to join Dick, introduced via freeze-frame title cards, with creative nicknames like “Motherfucker.” The visual style mixes ugly low-budget digital cinematography with arbitrary fake film grain, the action scenes are incoherent barrages of cheap CGI muzzle flashes and poorly staged stunts, and the dialogue is filled with empty edginess. The plot is a haphazard collection of B-movie clichés, including the requisite zombies, and it abruptly ends on a cliffhanger, promising that “Dick Dynamite will return.” Let’s hope not. Grade: D-
Freediver (VOD and Amazon Prime Video December 7): This documentary about champion freediver Alexey Molchanov is less attention-grabbing than the 2023 Netflix film The Deepest Breath, but it’s also less of a tease, with a more upfront presentation of the tragedy that fuels its central subject. Freediver is structured around Molchanov’s efforts to break world records in five different freediving disciplines over the course of a year, following him around the world to various competitions in the dangerous niche sport. Freediving involves plunging to great depths without the aid of breathing equipment, and while there are plenty of safety measures in place, it’s still incredibly risky. Molchanov competes in the shadow of his mother Natalia Molchanova, a fellow freediving record-holder who was his mentor and trainer before she died while on a dive. Director Michael John Warren only offers a surface-level exploration of Molchanov’s grief and obsession, but much of the diving footage speaks for itself. Freediver isn’t aiming to be a riveting suspense piece, instead offering a straightforward look at a truly unhinged pursuit. Grade: B
Endless Summer Syndrome (VOD and select theaters December 13): Ah, the French: Always drinking to excess, sunbathing topless, and having sex with their teenage adopted kids. Well, maybe that last one isn’t exactly common, but director and co-writer Kaveh Daneshmand’s film makes it seem like another part of the indulgent lifestyle enjoyed by wealthy French intellectuals. Lawyer Delphine (Sophie Colon), her novelist husband Antoine (Matheo Capelli), and their adopted children Aslan (Gem Deger) and Adia (Frédérika Milano) are having an idyllic summer at their country house before Aslan leaves for university, until Delphine gets an alarming phone call from a colleague of Antoine’s, claiming that he drunkenly revealed an inappropriate relationship with one of his kids. Framed by tense flash-forwards of a police interrogation, Endless Summer Syndrome is part thriller, part critique of bourgeois sexual morality, but Daneshmand isn’t just a shameless provocateur. He builds up a convincing, tender family dynamic before tearing it apart, giving each appalling revelation an emotional impact along with its intended shock value. Grade: B
Young Werther (VOD and select theaters December 13): Although snarky opening title cards tout the “hit” 1774 novel that provides its source material, writer-director José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço’s debut feature is only loosely based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 18th-century pop-culture sensation The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lourenço transposes the story to modern-day Toronto, and he mostly avoids the sorrows, instead serving up an aggressively whimsical romantic comedy that only partially gets by on the charms of its cast. The title character (Douglas Booth) is a rich, insufferable layabout who falls in love at first sight with the beautiful, intelligent Charlotte (Alison Pill), and doesn’t let a small obstacle like Charlotte’s engagement to lawyer Albert (Patrick J. Adams) get in the way of his romantic pursuit. Pill is as luminous and captivating as Booth is irritating, and they intermittently make for an appealing pair. But Lourenço’s efforts to translate 250-year-old courtship rituals to the present are awkward and off-putting, and the humor, like Werther, is more smug and condescending than endearing. Grade: C+
The Little Mermaid (VOD December 17): With all the attention given to horror movies based on newly available public domain properties like Winnie-the-Pooh and “Steamboat Willie,” it would be easy to overlook the wealth of easily exploitable material that has been in the public domain for decades. Writer-director Leigh Scott corrects that oversight here by freely “adapting” Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale. He’s really riffing on the hit Disney movie, with a handsome rogue archaeologist named Eric Prince and a crab-human hybrid monster called Sebastian. While searching for a lost civilization in the Caribbean, Eric (Mike Markoff) falls for the beautiful, mysterious Aurora Bey (Lydia Helen), who is, in the words of his colleague, “a fucking mermaid.” Helen delivers all her lines like she’s recording a sinister ASMR video, and Markoff expresses concern by frequently squinting. Scott throws in some H.P. Lovecraft to round out the public-domain plundering, but he neglects to include anything scary or disturbing — unless you count the sad attempt at piggybacking on a dispiriting horror trend. Grade: D+