Josh Bell
Two of this week’s fringe VOD releases make the unduly optimistic choice of including multiple post-credits scenes setting up genre franchises that will certainly never arrive, while the modest dramas about young women figuring out their lives prove more successful.
Guy Manley: Super Spy (VOD September 13): This English-language Swedish movie opens with a title card explaining that it began as a project among friends, and that’s probably where it should have stayed. It’s nice that those friends could reunite years later to finish the silly movie they came up with while in school, but the entire thing has the feel of someone else’s inside joke. Co-writer Baltazar Ploteau plays the title character, a former elite secret agent who’s now a washed-up drunk, hired by politician Buck Cash (Knut Wistbacka) to take out his brother Rich Cash (Anton Sjölund), an evil business tycoon running for mayor of their city. The lazy puns of the characters’ names represent the zenith of the movie’s humor, which lands somewhere between an Austin Powers sequel and a self-consciously “bad” movie like Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance. Everything from the loud performances to the garishly fake special effects to the graphic violence to the surprisingly frequent musical numbers is crudely overstated, stretching a thin comedy-sketch premise into an excruciating endurance test. Grade: D-
Lies We Tell (VOD September 13): Screenwriter Elisabeth Gooch and director Lisa Mulcahy take substantial liberties with their adaptation of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1864 Gothic novel Uncle Silas, but their reinvention relies a bit too heavily on the ceaseless victimization of its protagonist, teenage heiress Maud Ruthyn (Agnes O’Casey). Following her father’s death, Maud is placed in the care of her estranged uncle Silas (David Wilmot), who arrives at the sprawling Ruthyn country estate with his son Edward (Chris Walley) and daughter Emily (Holly Sturton) and proceeds to take over Maud’s life. Silas and his children are blatantly sinister, openly pursuing Maud’s inheritance via any means necessary, up to and including sexual assault. O’Casey is excellent as the defiant yet desperate Maud, who eventually finds a way to stand up to her nasty relatives, and she carries the movie past its Gothic melodrama clichés. Mulcahy conjures up enough unsettling atmosphere to give Lies We Tell a sense of eerie foreboding, and while it falls short of its classic inspirations, it’s still a worthwhile effort. Grade: B
The Zombie Wedding (VOD September 13): It’s tough to sustain the absurdity of Weekly World News topics like Elvis Presley’s resurrection for more than a few paragraphs, so an entire feature film in the aggressively wink-wink style of the long-running pseudo-satirical tabloid is quite an exhausting prospect. The Zombie Wedding is the initial result of WWN’s new push into film and TV, and it’s not a promising start. Adapted by WWN editor-in-chief Greg D’Alessandro from his own stage play, The Zombie Wedding follows the nuptials of a human bride (Deepti Menon) and an undead groom (Donald Chang) in the midst of a zombie outbreak. That provides the rudimentary structure for unfunny jokes, atrocious zombie makeup, lots of WWN plugs, and embarrassing turns from recognizable performers like Cheri Oteri, Heather Matarazzo, and Micky Dolenz. It makes sense that the original stage version was produced by the people responsible for Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding; maybe The Zombie Wedding would be more tolerable to watch while eating dinner and barely paying attention. Grade: D
Warchief (VOD September 17): It seems a little late for a Warcraft mockbuster, but that’s essentially what writer-director Stuart Brennan offers in this sword-and-sorcery knock-off, which appears to only have the budget to depict one orc at a time. Brennan plays the leader of a group of guardians escorting a mystical messenger across an ancient land. The characters spend most of their time trudging through the woods while spouting dialogue that sounds like it was drawn from a role-playing game’s rulebook, punctuated by occasional expository flashbacks and orc interludes. The group is trying to stop the rise of the orc Warchief (Mark Paul Wake), who issues a Warcry that creates a Warpath, drawing the Warshaman to the Warcamp (of course). There are requisite references to goblins, trolls and Ents, and Brennan even throws in some zombies for good measure. The makeup and costumes are passable for an afternoon of LARPing in the park, but there’s nothing here to suggest an expansive fantasy world — or even a theoretical destination for the characters’ quest. Grade: C-
Last Shadow at First Light (IndiePix Unlimited September 20): The hushed tone of writer-director Nicole Midori Woodford’s debut feature is alluring at first, but it becomes enervating over the course of the frustratingly slow-paced film, which takes its time leading its main character to a muddled, unsatisfying destination. The dissatisfaction is part of the point, though, since Ami (Mihaya Shirata), a Japanese teenager living with her father in Singapore, needs to learn to live with uncertainty. That’s tough to do when the uncertainty concerns her mother’s years-long absence and supposed death. Convinced that her mother is still alive, Ami journeys to Japan to track her down, meeting up with her uncle Isamu (Masatoshi Nagase) and traveling to the tsunami-ravaged region where her mother was last seen. Woodford aims for a meditation on grief and survivor’s guilt, but the wispy story and obtuse characterization don’t offer much to go on, and the mild supernatural elements are more confounding than intriguing. The movie is so subdued and vague that it dissipates without making any particular impact. Grade: C+
