Josh Bell
In this week’s minor VOD releases, Sigmund Freud faces Adolf Hitler, a Filipino drag queen seeks redemption, and Ron Perlman and Willem Dafoe half-heartedly add to their villain résumés.
Play Dirty (Tubi April 4): The cops and criminals in this desultory thriller are mostly just playing at being dirty, because director and co-writer Tom DeNucci can’t come up with anything convincing or authentic. The movie just offers a weak variation on genre clichés, as corrupt Atlantic City police detective Frank Grady (co-writer Theo Rossi) has to pull off one final job before he can escape the wrath of both local crime boss Murray (Ron Perlman) and his own department’s internal affairs investigators. Pointlessly told in flashback, Play Dirty follows Grady over the course of a single night as he takes out Murray’s primary rivals, each representing a basic gangster stereotype, from Italian goombahs to grizzled bikers. Rossi struggles to give Grady any moral complexity, and the charismatic Perlman is on bad-guy autopilot as the threatening mobster. The macho dialogue is sloppy (multiple characters say “calvary” when they mean “cavalry”), the action scenes are perfunctory, and the visual style barely reaches the level of a network TV procedural. Grade: C
V13 (Vimeo On Demand April 4; other VOD services May 13): The prospect of Sigmund Freud taking on Adolf Hitler is a lot more enticing than what writer-director Richard C. Ledes offers in this tedious, stilted drama, adapted from a stage play by Alain-Didier Weill. Like Ledes’ previous historical fan-fiction film Adieu, Lacan, V13 features characters delivering what sound like dramatic readings of freshman-year philosophy papers, without any actual insight or emotion. V13 opens with a quote from theorist Walter Benjamin that provides a justification for the present-day New York City locations, with characters mostly in modern dress and speaking English with American accents, but rather than connecting the current moment with 1913 Vienna, it merely comes off as an excuse for budgetary constraints. Ledes shifts aspect ratios and switches from color to black and white depending on the setting, but the excessive stylization just adds to the distancing effect, so that the impassioned rhetoric from both Freud (Alan Cumming) and Hitler (Samuel H. Levine) is equally meaningless. Diagnosis: overcompensation. Grade: C-
Asog (VOD April 11): There’s a lot of necessary cultural context that might make this docu-fiction hybrid less accessible for audiences outside the Philippines, but star Rey “Jaya” Aclao has enough charm to keep viewers engaged even without that extra-textual knowledge. Jaya and most of the cast members play versions of themselves, survivors of 2013’s devastating Typhoon Yolanda, which killed more than 6,000 people and caused nearly $3 billion in property damage. Those statistics aren’t in the movie, though, and there’s just a general sense of anger and loss as Jaya, a non-binary schoolteacher and drag performer, quits their job and decides to travel to an island resort to enter into a Ms. Gay beauty pageant. The shaggy-dog road-trip story is one of several disparate, discursive elements in Canadian director Seán Devlin’s fiery but unwieldy film, which includes magical-realist fables and unvarnished interviews with displaced typhoon survivors. The combination of environmental and queer activism is often rousing, though, and Devlin finds some beautiful imagery amid the storm’s lasting aftermath. Grade: B-
Zero (VOD and select theaters April 11): The propulsive energy of this largely nonsensical thriller only carries it so far before it falls apart under a mess of plot holes and haphazard political messaging. Director and co-writer Jean Luc Herbulot drops the audience right in the middle of the action, as a nameless American (co-writer Hus Miller) wakes up on a bus in Dakar, Senegal, with a bomb strapped to his chest. In vintage Hollywood tradition, the American is then instructed by a mysterious voice (Willem Dafoe, literally phoning it in) to complete various tasks to avoid being blown up. He’s later joined by a second American (Cam McHarg) in a similar predicament, and they travel across the city wreaking havoc that eventually spurs a social uprising. The mechanics of that process are often confusing, and while Herbulot offers a vibrant showcase for Dakar, he populates it with thinly sketched characters that are impossible to care about. Even with actual ticking time bombs, the short movie loses its sense of urgency far too quickly. Grade: C+
Call of the Void (VOD April 15): Something scary is out in the woods somewhere in this maddeningly vague folk horror movie. That’s only slightly less of an explanation than writer-director James B. Cox ever provides for the menace faced by the grieving Moray (Caitlin Carver), who just wants some peace and quiet at her family’s mountain cabin after losing her brother and quitting her job. Instead, she encounters a seemingly friendly group of musicians, whose invitations for breakfast and hiking carry a sinister undercurrent. It takes nearly an hour for that undercurrent to coalesce into genuine danger, and that danger is never clearly defined. The performances are solid, but there’s no dread or suspense in the build-up, which includes a lot of intimations about grief and several agonizing run-throughs of what is apparently the band’s only song. The brief glimpses of some kind of creature and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like affect of the people under its spell are mildly creepy, but mild creepiness is the best the movie can muster. Grade: C
