Josh Bell
This week’s fringe VOD releases feature the dual disappointments of director Neil Marshall’s continued artistic decline and Mickey Mouse’s opportunistic rise as a horror villain, plus a winning Spanish teen drama and a punk band’s bizarre sci-fi opus.
Libertad (Film Movement Plus August 2): The pacing in director and co-writer Clara Roquet’s debut feature is as languid as the summer that Spanish teenager Nora (Maria Morera) spends with her family at their vacation home in the seaside region of Costa Brava. Nora’s grandmother is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and her parents’ marriage seems to be falling apart, but she finds refuge in her newfound friendship with the pointedly named Libertad (Nicolle Garcia), the daughter of the family’s Colombian housekeeper. Libertad is as bold and worldly as Nora is timid and sheltered, and she opens Nora up to typical teenage fascinations like drinking and flirting. It’s all fairly mild, but Roquet isn’t interested in shock value, instead offering a subdued drama about growing up, with an undercurrent of class conflict. She isn’t saying anything particularly new, but she creates layered, engaging characters, with strong, subtle performances from the teenage stars. As far as “the summer that changed my life” stories go, Libertad is modest but rewarding, like the friendship between its lead characters. Grade: B
Ganymede (VOD August 6): The themes of this well-meaning supernatural drama are so thuddingly obvious that embodying them in a literal demon feels like overkill. Writer-director Colby Holt and his co-director Sam Probst deliver a more direct riff on the notorious homoeroticism of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, which used Freddy Krueger as a thinly veiled metaphor for its main character’s repressed gay desires. There’s nothing thinly veiled about the central metaphor here, with a demon stalking high school wrestling star Lee Fletcher (Jordan Doww) as he wrestles with romantic feelings for out-and-proud classmate Kyle Culper (Pablo Castelblanco). Lee’s ultra-religious parents send him to a virulently homophobic pastor (David Koechner) for “treatments” that combine prayer and electro-shock therapy. Doww and Castelblanco have an endearing dynamic that could have carried a low-key coming-of-age drama, but everything in Ganymede is pitched at such a histrionic level that it’s impossible to take seriously. At least Freddy’s Revenge was amusingly campy; Ganymede plays like the progressive version of a hysterical Christian tract. Grade: C
The Mouse Trap (VOD August 6; DVD/Blu-ray August 13): Once the 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoon short “Steamboat Willie” entered the public domain, it was inevitable that some enterprising indie filmmaker would exploit it for a horror movie. It was just as inevitable that the desperate first effort would be largely worthless, which is exactly the case with this rote, plodding slasher movie that has essentially nothing to do with “Steamboat Willie.” Writer Simon Phillips plays the manager of an indoor amusement center who’s hit by some sort of glitch while watching “Steamboat Willie,” which possesses him with a homicidal version of Mickey’s mischievous spirit and grants him Mickey’s well-known powers of, uh, teleportation. Mainly it just means a dude in a Mickey mask stalks and kills a group of annoying friends throwing an after-hours party. The kills are tame and uninspired, and the nonsensical plot is padded out with a redundant framing sequence, only to end so abruptly it seems like the filmmakers just gave up. Even a grinning symbol of corporate greed deserves better. Grade: D
Duchess (VOD August 9): It’s probably not fair to blame Neil Marshall’s wife Charlotte Kirk for the startling decline in the once-promising filmmaker’s career, but when Marshall has done nothing for the past several years but create disastrous showcases for his wife’s alleged talent, there aren’t many other ways to look at it. As co-writers and executive producers, Marshall and Kirk are equally at fault for this tedious Guy Ritchie rip-off, starring Kirk as Scarlett, a working-class pickpocket who graduates to international smuggling when she meets and falls instantly in love with the charisma-free Robert (Philip Winchester), a high-level diamond dealer. Kirk futilely attempts to channel Jason Statham both in her accent and in Scarlett’s belated shift toward single-minded vengeance, which comes after more than an hour of try-hard “cheeky” dialogue and explanatory freeze frames. Marshall is a long way from the elegant horror of Dog Soldiers and The Descent, and no matter how often the characters talk about how formidable Scarlett is, nothing about Duchess is remotely convincing. Grade: C-
Free LSD (VOD August 9): There’s a long history of rock bands making dubiously conceived film adaptations of their nebulous concept albums, but this incoherent feature debut from writer-director Dimitri Coats of the punk band Off! is no The Wall. In that same tradition, Coats and his fellow musicians Keith Morris, Autry Fulbright II and DH Peligro struggle to play themselves. The movie begins with its version of Keith as the sad proprietor of an adult video store, turning to a dubious medical practitioner (The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow) for a bit of male enhancement. Instead, he discovers that he’s an alternate-universe variant of the singer of Off!, and he must recruit versions of his bandmates to reform the group and save the world. That sounds like a goofy take on Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but Free LSD is more concerned with solemn New Age mumbo jumbo than silly jokes, and even the musical performances are interrupted by the incomprehensible plot mechanics. The 2022 album presumably has no such unnecessary distractions. Grade: C-
