MicroCinema Scene

“Don’t let the bastards get you down.” – Kris Kristofferson

We all catch colds.  Each and every single one of us knows the sting of a sore throat, the force of an unexpected sneeze and the burn under the nose from blowing it too many times without the comfort of Puffs Plus.  But as the majority of the visitors to this website are creative artists, most of us have also been similarly felled by another, occasionally more long-lasting virus:  self-doubt.  Like the common cold, self-doubt can make you feel tired and lazy.  Your feet will drag and you won’t be able to bring your chin up.  Your drive to do anything other than lie in bed and watch TV overrides everything.  Like a cold, self-doubt has a number of different causes and when you get it, you feel like you’re the only one in the world that has it.  This is to let you know that all creative artists get saddled with this virus because we all experience, in some form or another, very comparable symptoms.

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Having seen the trailers for various movies by writer/director Tony Marsiglia, I was genuinely intrigued by the direction Seduction Cinema seemed to be moving with their releases.  These trailers showcase excellent shooting, stylistic editing, actual plotting and even some genuine acting, all qualities with which the soft-core (and occasionally damn-near hardcore) production company never seemed to be much concerned.  Couple this with the recent successes of writer/director/FX-maestro Bret Piper within EI Independent Cinema’s ranks (the parent company of Seduction Cinema), and it appeared things were starting to change after repeated critical and public disdain for their quickie trash cinema projects, many of which are so bad they don’t even make decent beer-and-pizza night entertainment.

Unfortunately, Lust for Dracula is a case of “two steps forward, three steps back.” Crushed under the weight of having to make his intriguing concepts fit into Seduction Cinema’s oeuvre, Marsiglia exceeds in framing and lighting things beautifully in gorgeous high-def video, but overdoses on countless unsexy, gratuitous lesbian couplings.  The result is one of Seduction Cinema’s most bizarre and unwatchable failures, an art-house piece that’s just as poorly rendered as some of the company’s more throw-away offerings like Erotic Survivor, Mummy Raider or Vampire’s Seduction.

Whereas those flicks seem quickly, roughly slapped together to make a quick buck, Lust for Dracula is competently produced, slick, stylish, well-acted and completely, one hundred percent nonsensical. It’s a Bizarro world Seduction Cinema movie where production quality is the best asset and the obligatory Sapphic delight is positively dull. No really, guys…if you’re into anatomy, you might enjoy several eye-popping close-up angles on certain feminine body parts. But if you’re looking for sexy, look elsewhere. These girls often appear as though they’re at a tax seminar.

This isn’t to say the actresses aren’t trying. Believe me, Mundae and Wells do their damndest to give this movie a sense of honesty, with Mundae again exhibiting acting chops far beyond those viewers are used to her exhibiting. But there’s nowhere to go with the effort, something Caine seems to have figured out as she sleepwalks through her role as Dracula. In a plot that finds Julian Wells somehow playing the role of Jonathan Harker as, get this, a man (and wearing that same ill-fitting suit she wore in Bite Me,) and Mundae as his/her forlorn, always drugged, poetry-babbling Mina longing for attention and a child to dote upon, Lust for Dracula upends Bram Stoker’s classic story so much that it’s barely comprehendible.

And you thought Hollywood’s Van Helsing was a groaner? Try deciphering where many of the characters in this piece actually fit into the warped narrative. Or why is there a seemingly endless side-by-side female masturbation scene with two girls in school chairs. Or how Dracula’s attentions somehow fulfill Mina’s desire for a child (Which she calls her little “bat-bat,” natch). Or why Harker, in this telling, is a pharmaceuticals magnate, keeping Mina high on pills all the time.

These questions I simply couldn’t answer, largely because it’s impossible to keep in mind whatever narrative thread there is when the movie is drowning in art-house visuals and lesbian groping sessions.  Marsiglia explains in the director’s commentary that the screenplay for this movie has been something he wanted to make for many years, but that it initially didn’t have any sex in it.  Suddenly, the whole thing snaps into focus: at least sixty percent of the movie is swallowed up in protracted, bored lesbian trysts and none of it was originally part of the movie’s story!  As a result, you’ve got this somewhat interesting, although admittedly out there, revisionist take on a classic tale padded to feature-length (and beyond) by girls writhing in feigned ecstasy that barely hides their boredom.

These more lackadaisical couplings are interrupted by a rape scene between Wells and Mundae that finds the actresses mining previously unseen emotional reserves in their work, but one can’t get past the fact that Wells is a woman.  And here she is giving Mundae doggy-style forced entry without aid of a strap on or anything else.  The image is so bizarre, you simply can’t go on the ride with Marsiglia, and instead wonder “What the Hell am I watching?”

Neither sexy as a sex movie, nor compelling as art-house cinema, in the end the best intentions of the lead actresses and a truly gifted visualist can’t make this picture a worthwhile endeavor. I believe Marsigila has the talent to make very interesting, very entertaining cinema.  But here it just feels like he’s earning a paycheck while having a little fun with audience expectations, and the audience, in turn isn’t going to have much fun.

The DVD is loaded with all sorts of extras including a trailer vault, the aforementioned commentary with Marsiglia and EI Independent Cinema head honcho Michael Raso (who I believe was probably furious when he saw what Marsiglia turned in), a behind-the-scenes documentary, a short movie called Insex (that’s interesting, but ultimately too short), and an interview with Misty Mundae.

One and a half stars.

After sitting through the intriguing endurance test that was Alter Ego’s Big Boobs, Blonde Babes, Bad Blood, I came away with the impression that Shane Ryan, Alter Ego’s main auteur, is a fearless, charismatic moviemaker and a talented editor. Afraid that any precious footage of a failed project may go to waste, he’s recycled more than one submarined movie attempt into a rash of short film work that’s sometimes compelling, sometimes lazy and often challenging. So it’s no surprise then that Ryan’s first “feature-length” effort, Amateur Porn Star Killer leads me to the same conclusions. Ryan, a good-looking, charismatic guy in his early twenties, likes to make movies that test the boundaries of taste and proper cinematic conduct. His friends trust him enough that they get lead into some pretty creepy, scary places, especially Michiko Jiminez who picks up here where she left off with Ryan in his sex-fueled short The Cold Heat. But unlike the occasionally compelling testing-of-limits that happens in his shorter work, here the experiment crashes and burns in a flurry of narcissism, supposed edginess and violent porn masquerading as a narrative. While all involved certainly give their all (and bare their all) for the sake of realism, at the end of the picture a viewer wonders why and no matter how strong the performances may be, they struggle for a point.

Alter Ego Cinema wants you to believe this is a movie. Perhaps to some it is. To me, it’s an episode of The Bang Bus or Net Video Girls gone wrong. Unfamiliar with the references? Both are supposed “reality porn” sites that find guys soliciting sex from “real” girls who get picked up on the side of the road (Bang Bus) or who are “auditioning” for a photo calendar (Net Video Girls.) In both cases, women are degraded and treated as whores, performing all manner of sexual acts, specifically really long bouts of oral sex.

Yeah, I’ve seen it and I suspect plenty of others have to, including Shane Ryan, who does an off-kilter version of Net Video Girl’s first-person camera person/porn star. Ryan’s camera jockey “seduces” an 18, no 16, no 13 year-old(!) girl in a seedy hotel room using - get this - ageism of all things as the dramatic logic for why the girl stays in his room while he molests her. Yeah… sick stuff indeed, and certainly not for the faint of heart, although I suspect not too many “faint-of-heart” types are going to check out something called Amateur Porn Star Killer, eh? While Ryan’s “Brandon” character chides Michiko Jiminez’s “Stacy” into stripping and then performing oral sex, we’re treated to several pseudo flashbacks of one of “Brandon’s” previous victims in seemingly private boudoir footage that looks like a bald-headed Ryan getting it on with a girlfriend. This footage more echoes the “reality porn” approach, with the fetching blonde lass all too ready to strip down and get raw, and interestingly, we never see her tragic end although it’s assumed by the title and a brief epilogue card that she fares no better than Stacy. What happens to our thirteen year-old heroine? After silently submitting to “Brandon’s” persuasion, she is suffocated with a pillow and then punched to death. I don’t think I’m ruining the ending. It is called Amateur Porn Star Killer after all.

If you want to spend time considering what it all means, those looking for a good reason why this “movie” exists could argue that Ryan is condemning the “reality porn” world and drawing a possible, frightening road map to where it may lead. I’ve often wondered myself just how far porn will go until it makes a complete metamorphosis into violence, and the increasing popularity of movies like House of 1000 Corpses and the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre indicate a society that’s becoming more fascinated by the taboos of torture and violence than those associated with sex. Here we see a version of “reality porn” that, albeit stylized to echo the cliché vibe of a snuff film, attempts to be a cinema verité serial killer movie. But it doesn’t work because the narrative’s intentions are too muddied, the movie is too long, and the motivations too illogical. The end result is something so close to true “reality porn” that it could be wack-off material for a new generation of people cherishing sadism more than the peepshow. And if that’s what this is, then the day of “violence as porn” has truly arrived and Shane Ryan’s standing on the front lines.

I started MicrocinemaScene in part to chronicle the trends that permeate the no-budget moviemaking world, and more and more I see indicators that much of what’s out there is thinly disguised girl-next-door voyeurism, usually wrapped in horror conventions. Attention to the grammar of cinema and the ethics of storytelling are being discarded perhaps because people are too lazy to learn them or because they’re too hard to follow on no budget or because they truly are trying to do something new and follow a ground-breaking muse. With Amateur Porn Star Killer, the intentions simply aren’t clear and the result is certainly not entertaining, titillating (at least in a conventional sense) or worthy of most movie viewers’ time. It’s a garbled, quasi-one take mess with Michiko Jiminez and unnamed others blindly playing Chloe Sevigny to Ryan’s baring-it-all-proudly Vincent Gallo. Perhaps as narcissistic and masturbatory as Brown Bunny, Ryan’s movie could be far more dangerous than Gallo’s love letter to himself. It’s a shame too, because I believe Ryan could be a great voice for cinema if he reigned himself in and went into his productions not for the shock value, but for reasons that are more identifiably honest. 

With a very short running time, concise editing, and a lithe musical score by Helen Simmins-McMillan, Bret Hampton (father of Alter Ego creative head Shane Ryan) proves his cinematic chops come from a more conventional wisdom of moviemaking than do his son’s. There’s nothing wrong with either point of view; whereas Shane Ryan’s faults sometimes result from his being too experimental, in Three Little Words, Hampton’s only miss-step seems to be that he played it too safe. Three Little Words is a metaphorical tale about waiting too long to tell someone how you feel about them that’s comically played and competently produced without any real style. Simple shooting and lighting perhaps leave the short a tad too flat, but then again it’s not completely necessary to gussy up a story this precise.

All talent involved contribute without dialogue to the lighter air of the irony-laced story by playing their parts with some degree of exaggeration, and the wig and beard set that Mancuso later dons as “the writer” are so gimmicky that they just add to the overall light, comic feel. The movie doesn’t miss a note in its running time and reminds me a lot of some of the better comedic stuff by Ohio short moviemaestro Peter John Ross – light, fluffy and easily digestible. I will commend to the performance of the late, great “Zak Druse,” a terrific canine actor. As one who has worked with dogs on a flick, I was very impressed with how editing and the dog’s natural ability allowed him to add a nice footnote to the story.

I’m shocked a bit by how Three Little Words sits alongside the maverick movie musings of the rest of Alter Ego Cinema. Whereas the majority of the group’s work is violent, sexual or angry, this is plain and concise storytelling that gives you a clear beginning, middle and end while always kmaintaining a one-note tone. Perhaps too short and sweet, those who like their short movies as such will enjoy this quite a bit.

If you visit this site, you are probably a moviemaker and chances are in grade school you were a bit of an artistic type. Or maybe you just knew one or two artistic types. Regardless, did you ever notice in school that artistic types would doodle or sketch in their notebooks during class? I used to draw the prositron gliders from Ghostbusters in the margins of all of my notebooks, but sometimes when I was really bored, I would sketch something a little more impressive and maybe show it to a couple of friends. After that, I wouldn’t even save it, never mind attempt to get it into a gallery and show the world my doodling. Alas, this is what Joseph F. Alexandre appears to be doing with his latest picture God Save the Queen. Essentially a cinematic “doodle” haphazardly shot on Super 8mm film, Alexandre wants you to believe this is a “ lyrical, meditative appreciation of California’s central coast that quickly shifts into an explosive polemic charged with political overtones.” In reality, it’s nothing more than absently drawn doodling material – something someone bored would throw together on a Sunday afternoon if one had a handful of raw footage, a classical music piece, and a punk rock diatribe from the Sex Pistols.

Tailor made for the festival circuit with an easy to swallow under-five-minute running time and packing a liberal agenda that condemns the Bush Administration by juxtaposing shots of oil rigs off the California coast with shots of W. on the television, God Save the Queen gains all of its energy from the Sex Pistols song of the same name. And by that rationale, it’s not so much a doodle as it is a “trace” of someone else’s work. Without the Sex Pistols, the meaning of Alexandre’s “polemic” would be ‘nil. With it, there’s at least some context for the sloppily shot and strung together raw footage.

Do you want to see some pasted together raw footage that’s well-shot, well-cut, festival ready, politically charged, emotionally gripping and not dependent on others’ artistic expression? Check out Bobby Miller’s NYC Loves George Bush, an ultra-short documentary from Rigged Productions that carries more weight in its last five seconds than God Save the Queen carries in dozens of repeated viewings. That’s gallery work, not this.

One Star

(Apologies to Mr. Alexandre for the tardiness of this review which comes out a good six months after he mailed his screener in to MicrocinemaScene.)

I apologize for the preamble to this review, but I think it goes a long way in describing how I thought about A Certain Justice as I watched the picture, both as a reviewer and as a moviemaker, and how a rough-hewn production can still manage to earn high marks despite having many faults.

Having seen more than my fair share of material made at the low/no-budget level, I’ve come to the conclusion that there aren’t many different kinds of Microcinema work when it comes to fictional narrative structure. There are your skits, those under five-minute shorts that lead up to a single punch line, there are your art-house shorts and features, and then there are your largely linear narrative shorts and features. You see skits more than anything else because they play at festivals and take up zero webspace to stream, which is unfortunate because it’s the most flawed category. The reasoning for festival play is simple, the more movies you can play, the more moviemakers will submit and come to your festival. Alas, the danger of skits is that they’re often ill-produced (sometimes these “movies” are a single camera set-up) and their punch lines are wildly hit or miss. When they miss, it’s okay though, because they’re only 2 or three minutes long.

I believe that the second most popular category is the art house flick, largely because they’re easy for novices to slap together. Rhyme or reason isn’t applicable, plot is an afterthought and rough production value is a stylistic decision. When it comes to watching art house flicks, though, the features are often endurance tests while the shorts can be mildly interesting. Best about this category is the style exhibited by many of the flicks. They may not make sense to all viewers, but they look really neat or are cut inventively.

That leaves us with the straight-up narrative picture, which takes the conventional road of movie storytelling: that of seamless edits, realistic acting, engrossing story, etc. Understandably, fewer no-budget moviemakers attempt this kind of work because when it’s done poorly, it’s extremely distracting and can ruin a viewer’s experience (thus making the moviemaker look bad.) As a reviewer, I instantly rate movies a little higher that attempt true narrative moviemaking because I understand how tough it is as a moviemaker to pull off. And with Christopher Allen’s labyrinthine, ambitious, flawed but cohesive feature-length thriller A Certain Justice, I award high marks not because the movie is a knock-out, but because the effort is so damn earnest that you have to credit the moviemakers. They’re trying very hard here folks, and unlike many who say they try, you can actually SEE the effort onscreen because there’s honesty in the work.

A Certain Justice’s story is very difficult to sum up succinctly and touching upon various details may make it seem more random than it is. There are more subplots and characters than most any movie I’ve seen at this level, but essentially it’s a vigilante justice movie that splits its time between two lead characters. The first is an ex-police officer with a troubled childhood who has turned into criminal-killer acting outside the law. The second is a lesbian stripper (stop giggling) also with a damaged childhood who wants to murder her abusive stepfather. Both get caught up in a plot that tenuously involves a black market cloning ring run by a prominent CEO.

Even from this cursory description, you can see that Allen, (very much like fellow Microcinema writer/director Mike Amato of Jodom Pictures) is aiming high with this tale, not willing to let his budget dictate to him what he can and cannot do. And often times Allen, (again like Amato) pulls off engaging, gripping cinema because he’s covered so many bases that don’t distract viewers from really successful moments. With solid production design, careful shooting, seamless edits and an involving (if overly convoluted) story, A Certain Justice is a movie that isn’t as great as the sum of its parts, but it’s also a movie that doesn’t suffer from its faults as much as it could have because of the honest effort put in by all parties involved.

In terms of production value, when Allen gives you a wood-paneled room filled with office equipment and maps, you buy it as a police station. It works. When a dark basement lab is presented in the basement of a mansion, it doesn’t look cheap or lame. When he stages a climactic showdown between vigilante ex-cop John Ryder and the Feds in an abandoned warehouse, the location is fitting. This attention to detail is consistent throughout the movie and it allows you to follow the characters on their strange trip.

Where doesn’t the movie work? Most of the problems come from a script that results in uneven acting on the part of almost everyone in the movie as they cope with overwritten dialogue and a storyline that sometimes stretches credibility too far. Cops don’t pursue a suspect when he flees the scene of a crime, a prominent, charitable CEO who seems fine under the spotlight of the media is actually an insane (and apparently motive-less) babbling psychopath running a mad scientist lab in his basement, two leads lacking chemistry who don’t trust anyone are forced into getting cuddly and sharing their inner-most secrets, an agent for the FBI goes Clarice Starling for no apparent reason and decides to apprehend a hostile without back-up… It goes on and on. All of these screenplay issues hinder the movie from really becoming something great. A more focused story that relied less on chance events would have made everything work considerably better.

When it comes to the acting, as mentioned, the talent seems sometimes baffled by their characters, but other times they’re just plain miscast. Jason Kistler does an admirable job of trying to bring a hardened Ex-cop John Ryan to life, and while he excels at several of the more emotional scenes, it’s hard to buy his round, youthful face as that of someone who has done what Ryan has done and seen what Ryan has seen. Similarly, Melissa Greathouse and Erin Clarich just don’t seem comfortable in scenes where their love is supposed to be apparent. While the lesbian relationship is handled with sensitivity in the screenplay, the pair appears awkward when together, and like Kistler and Greathouse later in the movie, there’s a real lack of chemistry.

While some actors can’t seem to get much of a handle on their characters at times, Bobby Christman has too much of a grasp on the conventional manner to portray nutty cloning expert/CEO Victor Grant. His performance is rife with cliché and while he earnestly seems to believe what he’s doing is right on, it seems too comic book for a picture that often treats its subject matter with such serious weight. Filling out the rest of the cast is David Grant Briggs as Ryan’s ex-partner, Betsy Boatwright as a walking cliché ball-buster of an FBI agent, Bob Berry as Ryan’s minister father, and John David Barker as the token wisecracking cop. While Briggs consistently brings gravity to his role and Barker handles his one-note character well enough, the rest of the cast suffer form the same unevenness that hurt the leads. One would be remiss to not mention, however, the eerie presence of Monique Raymond as “woman,” a cloning experiment gone sour who lives in the basement of Victor Grant. Almost always seen pumping iron and staring blankly into space, when she’s called on to bring some emotion to the table late in the picture, she proves she’s up to the task.

In acting, doing emotional scenes often scores the most points with viewers because people think “Wow… look that person is really crying” or “Whoa… he’s really angry.” In truth, however, emotional scenes are the easier to portray because the context is apparent to the performer. In A Certain Justice, there are several very emotional moments during which previously struggling talent suddenly come to life. Specifically, the scene when Greathouse’s character Ramona breaks it off with her girlfriend, (played by Erin Clarich) packs a real emotional wallop. After Ramona leaves, her lover crumbles onto the floor and cries like a wounded animal. While some may believe it to be overwrought, I found it to be extremely moving and genuine. If you’ve been there in life, you’ve seen people react like this and I credit Clarich for stopping the movie in its place and adding realism to her character’s next actions which are, again, a stretch in logic screenplay-wise. It’s a shame more attention couldn’t have been paid to the less emotional scenes that are often played out with cardboard efficiency.

As you can see, A Certain Justice is a mixed bag, and an interesting picture to watch to see what happens when ambition isn’t tempered by logic or budgetary restraints. A sprawling, unfocused screenplay that could have easily killed many a lesser-produced Microcinema effort is kept alive by strong production values (including a great music score by Tony Whitlock,) but the biggest asset to the movie is the earnestness with which it is produced. Christopher Allen and many of his performers really believe in what they are doing, and it’s that belief that makes so much of this picture work. At one point in the story, a character passes away and in a moment right out of Return of the Jedi, the character appears in a younger form along with his deceased loved ones before the surviving member of the family. It should have been laughable, but somehow it’s not. That’s what the entire picture feels like; something unbelievable rendered into reality by honesty.

Three and a half stars

Back in 2001-2002, I spent a lot of time behind a Canon XL-1 digital video camera. Shooting several movies and working full time as a multi-media producer, I got to know the camera very well. That’s why I’m in awe at Mark Norberg’s debut feature, The Heat Chamber. As someone who prides himself on being a semi-decent cameraperson, I’m actually ashamed at how inadequate my work with the camera is when compared to gorgeous visuals achieved by Norberg’s director of photography Damain Acevedo. While the movie definitely looks shot on video, the lighting and framing are impeccable, something you just don’t see all that often at this level.

Alas, The Heat Chamber does have it over many a Microcinema production: while an $80,000 budget isn’t a lot of money to Hollywood, to we no-budgeters out here it may as well be $1 million. And what’s sad is that $80,000 can buy you some nice production value, a good shooter and some very good actors, but it can’t buy you a satisfying third act. Ultimately, that’s what brings down this otherwise notable movie.

In the movie we meet Jeff, a racecar driver who crashes and burns in the opening moments of the movie only to survive and end up in domestic purgatory with a nagging wife and a go-nowhere job as a cabbie. Wife Peggy wants a baby and demands Jeff apologize to her brother so Jeff can work as a bricklayer for him. Jeff wants to get back to his glory days of racecar driving. Then a mysterious stranger named Lila takes a ride in Jeff’s cab one day, strategically arranging a way to get him curious about her. But Ms. Lila’s advances aren’t as straightforward as they initially seem. Turns out she wants Jeff to have sex with a woman while being videotaped for the enjoyment of her “client.” Their acts will be recorded on a camera. He will be paid $30,000 in installments for his hard work, enough to fix his racecar and get Peggy off his back. At first Jeff is sickened by his weakness to accept this proposition, but soon he accepts his role in things and the money starts rolling in. But then something very unexpected happens – he falls in love with his bedmate, a red-hot beauty in a blonde wig named Sara.

To say any more about the twisty, labyrinthine plot of The Heat Chamberwould be to give away too much. Unfortunately, it would also necessitate revealing the weaker parts of the narrative. Initially a tense, smart and surprising moral drama, Norberg’s movie devolves into a series of phantasmagoric events – each revelation stretching credibility that much more than the one preceding it. By the time we figure out the cryptic title, the movie arrives at an abrupt, unsatisfying end.

For their part, the actors are terrific. Norberg assembled a great cast, led solidly by Shawn Hoffman as Jeff. Hoffman is a very attractive guy, evoking both Tim Daly and Steve Railsback as he cries, shouts and suffers through the hardships of Jeff’s decisions. Supporting him are two terrific performances from Kelly Chambers as Sara and Susan Matus as Peggy. Sara would have been played by Patricia Arquette if this were an A-list movie, but Cambers could probably run circles around Hollywood’s choice. She plays Sara as a victim, a survivor and a hurt sexual slave, and at every moment conveys honesty. Matus would be looked over for the role of Peggy in Hollywood because of look-a-like Claire Forlani, but again, the unknown actress would beat the pants off the celebrity in the acting chops department. As Peggy, Matus makes the viewer feel her pathos, turning what could have been a one-sided, nag of a wife into a flesh-and-blood character. The same cannot be said for Carolyn Hennesy’s Lila. A femme fatale cut from the cloth of Film Noir, at the beginning her sultry coolness works perfectly, but by the time the plot goes wacky, she’s left playing a personae that simply couldn’t take up residence in the same world as the rest of the characters. Whereas they’re honest and understandable, her logic is out of left field and her villainy becomes almost Disney-fied. It’s like replacing Bridget Fonda with Glenn Close’s Cruella De Ville in A Simple Plan, a fault that lies more with writer/director Norberg than poor Hennesy who has the unenviable task of making sense of her character.

As mentioned prior, the visuals of the movie are extraordinary for such a low end camera, and The Heat Chamber proves yet again that when done right, ultra-low budget movies can hide their production value fairly well. Yes, it’s got that video feel, but toss on a little film look and no one would have been the wiser. In fact, had the movie been shot in PAL, much of it would have felt like a B.B.C. production. Just with a little more zip and style that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

One repeated motif where style didn’t always work was created through the blue-screen process. Since the car racing scenes were apparently outside the budget of the movie (hey, they had Joe Estevez in a supporting role,) those scenes come very close to being laughable with the dodgy, almost trippy blue-screen work. Better are the random shots when it’s thrown in, like a shot where Lila is walking downtown and the entire first love scene in which the actors are matted into a vibrant red room. These hallucinatory moments add a lot to the picture and put you inside Jeff’s mind as events spin out of control. Had they utilized this motif more, the blue-screen heavy ending would have been far more effective. As it is, sometimes it feels stylized while other times it appears a cost saver. The filmmakers shouldn’t despair too much, some of this motif reminded me of Hitchcock’s work. (Think Jimmy Stewert falling from the roof in Rear Window or, even better, the various falling scenes in Vertigo.)

The Heat Chamber has a lot going for it: very involving first and second acts, strong visuals, terrific acting and the smartness to know that a sex scene doesn’t have to show anything to be erotic. But amateurish writing illustrated by Hennesy’s cartoon-like villain and a third act that spins way out of control almost buries the movie in mediocrity.

Three stars

If nothing else, Hope proves that $250 partnered with today’s technological tools and buckets of effort can get you some pretty impressive production value. In this 25-minute prologue to a larger story called Heartland: An American Nightmare, we see the Golden Gate bridge submerged in San Francisco Bay, great plumes of smoke wafting over burning cities and an eroded Statue of Liberty still standing, through probably not for long.

All done on a $250 budget with After Effects and Photoshop. Whoa.

The story finds our heroine, a young college girl named Hope, on a road trip back from her West Coast College to her home town in the center of the Promised Land. While en route, the world goes to Hell in a handbasket, over-run by a red dust contagion that converts the masses into zombie hordes. Chaos and burning cities ensue, although we only see the aftermath.

Although many of the visual effects aren’t that convincing, the effort from jack of all trades Wade F. Stai on this movie is astounding. The writer/director/shooter/editor/effects guy/caterer pulls out every trick in the “post apocalypse” book that’s been laid out by Hollywood over the last 50 years, and while that’s commendable, it’s also oddly the movie’s failure. In Hope, Stai is trying to do an epic story on a shoestring, the exact opposite of what someone like M. Night Shyamalan did with a movie like Signs. Whereas Shyamalan worked at the intimacy and increasing dread seen in small spaces, Stai seems more compelled to show the larger scale, which isn’t nearly as nightmarish. Why? It’s not because Stai’s effects are limited by budget, but more because we’ve seen it all before. Most recently, The Day After Tomorrow wiped the world out with special effects, but before that there was Independence Day, The Stand, The Day After and plenty of others. Hell, even Escape from L.A. with its big California Quake sequence offered destruction on a massive scale. And why the Hell were there two moons in the sky in Hope? Perhaps I missed a voice over explanation, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. Wouldn’t the world have been wiped out by tidal waves before fire? It appears Stai just figured it’d look neat (which it did) but why include it when it needn’t be there?

All of this attention to post production, with super Dolby-fied sound effects, and ton of After Effects plug-ins contributes to a movie that’s largely style over substance – something that it desperately doesn’t want. As Hope walks through now desolate streets and parks, she looks somewhat bored and she speaks in baby-voiced narration about how much the world changed and how everyone and everything she’s loved is gone. This ponderous narration feels read off a page, lacking the pathos it wants to convey even though it’s written in pretty broad strokes. Sometimes it’s interrupted by shots of The End of the World as seen through poorly delivered television newscasts and slow tracking shots of a world in ruin. Another time, Hope’s ruminations are halted by a zombie attack when she, mistakenly, breaks an empty soda bottle. This sequence with the bottle is one of the only non-stylistically edited scenes in the movie, and it musters up a pretty fair degree of suspense. It’s a shame there isn’t more of this kind of storytelling at work. Instead, the movie is largely composed of assembled images that have no direct relation with one another, Stai tossing out traditional narrative cinema in exchange for the more non-linear approach largely favored by “artistes.” Whereas a normal movie has action within a scene and shots that lead logically from one to another, Hope is bound together by narration and clips of what’s going on, almost like a long trailer. The effect is numbing after awhile and works against the movie’s wish to be something heart-felt.

In the end, Hope is technically impressive but lacks soul, showing that even though a ton of effort can be spent making a movie, without good acting and a solid, original screenplay all you get are pretty pictures.

It should be mentioned that there are all kinds of nifty extras on the Hope DVD including behind the scenes interviews, deleted scenes, and outtakes, but do skip the embarassingly slapped together “slasher movie” homage called Homecoming that Stai would have been wise to have left off the DVD.

Two stars

Since first catching Titanic 2000 way back in 2000, I’ve always wanted to like EI Cinema releases more than they have allowed me to like them. The spirited tomfoolery in something like Titanic 2000, with its combination of laughable special effects, strong comedic performances and just-long-enough digressions into trou-dropping, made the EI label appear as though its releases had something new, campy and exciting to offer.  Unfortunately, they never really reclaimed the heights of my first, fun introduction to their studio, instead losing the balance they struck so effectively with Titanic 2000.  For a time, their movies seemed dangerously close to pornography, emphasizing more and more the T&A value, losing the strong, charismatic performances and undervaluing the strength of laughter to keep their work afloat.  Gladiator Eroticus was about the only movie I’d seen from them since 2000 that worked up a giggle, but even that spent at least ¾ of its running time with long lingering scenes of Sapphic delight. Not that I mind, but I thought I was watching a sexy comedy and not simply straight-up porn.

Fortunately, the Shock-O-Rama line of EI seems to be bringing back the fun, and special effects guru Brett Piper’s campy, goofy and sometimes rather gross Bite Me shows the writer/director in fine form, besting his previous EI effort The Screaming Dead by leaps and bounds. The key?  Keeping tongue firmly in cheek.

By playing fast and loose with the conventions of movies and TV shows from the Atomic Age, Piper brings to life a gaggle of nasty mutant spiders that sneak out of an infected crate of high grade contraband.  These stop-motion arachnids invade, of all places, a dinosaur-themed strip club run by a scurrilous, loudmouth owner (Michael R. Thomas in shouting mode) who employs the three most pathetic strippers in the world, (EI poster girl Misty Mundae, with Erika Smith and Caitlin Ross.) Add a bossy Mafiaso’s widow eyeing to shut down the strip club, (Wells, trying so hard to channel The Sopranos that James Gandolfini is in pain) a psycho special agent with facial ticks, (Fedele) a French, nymphomaniac bar maid, (Sylviane Chebance) and a lunk-headed exterminator, (Rob Monkiewicz) and what you have is an entertaining ensemble cast of over-actors in quirky roles going ten shades of beserk once the spiders break loose.  It’s a “beer and movie night” flick with plenty of gratuitous, if somewhat un-titillating nudity, a mad-cap tone, and a hilarious plot twist that finds spider victims not dying, but instead acting curiously aggressive thanks to their eight-legged friends’ bites.

Right from the get-go, you know Bite Me isn’t taking things seriously.  The opening credits parody just about any softcore movie you’ve seen since the early 90’s, oogling the body of Misty Mundae while she “dances” around a pole, yet never once does it try to be sexy.  Instead, Mundae with eyes hanging heavy, appears as if she’s about to fall asleep on stage, moving with as much sexual charisma as a doorknob. The tone set is a curious one – at first I thought we were actually seeing Mundae’s contempt for being asked to drop her gear YET AGAIN for a movie. Alas, in the next scene, Mundae comes into the girls’ dressing room post gig and complains about how bored she is (and, in one of the movie’s funniest moments, adds that she lacks “Stripper Tits,” acknowledging a bit of stretched casting.)

I’ve often wondered whether Misty Mundae could act. Other than acting like getting head from a female co-star is the most mind-shatteringly gratifying experience she’s ever had, I’ve not seen her do much in other EI movies.  In the behind the scenes extras on the disc, it’s explained that Mundae had no time to prepare for this role as she was a last-minute casting replacement.  Well, perhaps she should never be allowed to prepare, because in Bite Me, Mundae is the star EI always tries to make her.  First very funny as the theme-less, bored stripper Crystal, after being bit by one of Piper’s crazy looking arachnids, (in a shower scene, natch) Mundae channels her inner Rambo, waging war on the little buggers.  The testosterone-driven Mundae is very funny, showing genuine acting chops, and had they somehow worked in a final dance with Mundae in her aggressive new “character,” they could have closed off Crystal’s storyline about not having a theme, making Mundae’s performance even stronger.  Misty Mundae can act when she wants to, and her turn in Bite Me is proof.  I look forward to seeing her in upcoming works from inspired visualist Tony Marsiglia, another in-house talent that EI has smartly let do his own thing as they have with Piper.

It is a shame that most of the cast doesn’t quite reach Mundae’s level of inspired wackiness, but some still have strong moments.  Powered by some fun writing in their characters, fellow strippers Erika Smith (as the clutz Trix) and Caitlin Smith (as stoner stripper Amber) offer up some decent laughs. Oddly, though, Trix disappears without any mention as to what happened to her about midway through the movie! For their part, Rob Monkiewicz and Sylviane Chebance do fine, charismatic work as “Buzz” the Exterminator and Gina the bartender.  Alas, EI’s regular players John Fedele, Michael R. Thomas and Julian Wells never seem to rise above cookie-cutter portrayals of their comic book personas.  In Wells’ case, she’s partially held down by some horribly askew wardrobe that betrays the supposed savvy of her character, but Fedle is the most disappointing.  In the past, Fedele has been the best (non nude and writhing) part of many an EI release, but here he rarely reaches his usual level of likable mayhem.

Regardless, Piper has unleashed a fun movie that’s not too much worse off for its faults thanks to some fun details and moments.  With a strip club named Go-Go-Saurus, stop motion spiders that seem to attack in some oddly sexual ways (Wells’s Theresa gets nabbed in an “uncomfortable place,” while bartender Gina gets a massage from another and Crystal is tagged in the shower,) and a great scene where Buzz and Crystal exchange Urban myths, Bite Me moves fast, keeps the laughs coming and makes viewers squirm in all the right places.

Three and a half stars

A few years back, Steven Soderberg’s remake of the Rat Pack flick Oceans 11 exploded onto screens with such gleeful confidence and self-assurance in its pacing, direction and performances that it was almost impossible for one to dismiss as “just another movie.” The film moved like a bullet, traveling a semi-worn plot guided to a bulls-eye by sheer charisma. Jesse Cowell’s $2000 comedy feature Shades of Gray does the same thing, only without the likes of Soderberg, Clooney, Pitt, Roberts, and Damon. A rapid-fire comedy that could very well be the funniest movie this reviewer has ever seen at the no-budget level, Cowell’s Shades of Gray is a shot-in-the-arm for Microcinema comedies, a bar-raising, consistant laugh-inducer that’s as shockingly confident and assured as its cleaned-up Hollywood cousin.

While I find the vibe coming off Shades of Gray to be more reminiscent to the Oceans 11 remake because of its ensemble cast and break-neck pace, many will find the dialogue to be somewhat Clerks-flavored. While the vulgarity runs high, I’d argue that it’s well-placed, and unlike Kevin Smith’s gem, the dialogue in this piece propels scenes forward almost as fast as the editing and wonderful camera moves. If this is Clerks, it’s that movie with more diversified, interesting characters and a camera that actually gets off the tripod.

The logic tying all of these great qualities together is a simple revenge plot about a group of friends who have been wronged for far too long by their buddy Eric, a selfish yet likable bad guy who is both the protagonist and antagonist of the movie. Having stolen Eric’s “little black book” filled with star-ratings and occasionally vulgar descriptions of his many sexual conquests, his friends believe they now have the one thing that might get Eric to sit down and listen to their grievances with him. If he doesn’t repent for his sins, the book will be mailed off to Eric’s latest gal pal who he appears to really, truly care about, a woman named Charlie brought to life by Julie Anne Terrell as a charming short-haired lass with delightfully expressive doe eyes.

Played with frenetic, bug-eyed energy by writer-director-co-producer Cowell, Eric’s torment over the book is at once very real, yet absolutely deserved and hilarious. It’s a real credit to the writer/director to be able to portray this character as reprehensible and yet keep him likable. He screams, titters, smiles, shouts, cowers and shakes his way through the character’s several one-on-one’s with the various friends whose stories of betrayal range from amusing to outright hilarious. Best are Eric’s confrontation with Chris, whose offhand remark about his cat destroys his reputation at school when Eric tells everyone about it, and Eric’s confrontation with Dave, whose girlfriend and supermarket woes seem to result from Eric’s sadistic meddling. While Chris is usually the calm, brooding guy in dark glasses and Dave is a prime candidate for years worth of anger management, both men reach a fever pitch during their sit downs with Eric that are bolstered by inventive, brilliant editing in addition to the well rendered, rage-fueled performances by Russ Jones (Chris) and Tyler Brooks (Dave.) Brook’s Dave is particularly noteworthy as one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever seen in a movie at this level, as each time he comes onscreen I found myself laughing. Hard.

This isn’t to say that the other players don’t get their moments to shine – each and every one of the performers get to steal a scene at one time or another. And as Guy, the chubby kid with a heart of gold who isn’t sure he wants to punish his oldest buddy Eric, Guy Rader does a nice job keeping the movie based in a real, emotional place. Guy’s friendship with Charlie makes the case for revenge a bit less strong, and this added complexity to the narrative keeps the movie from being as one-note as it easily could have been. It’s the inclusion of such subplots, whether they be the hilarious Spanglish screamed conflicts between Jed and his spicy sister Linda or the teenage-adoration for Eric harbored by Guy’s sister, that make the movie rise above its somewhat weak central concept. Every time the flick stretches credibility, as it does with the conflicts between Eric, Jed and Victor which each reach a little too hard for their wrongdoing, it’s centered again by solid subplotting. In fact, one of the subplots, involving a Bull-dog of a man (played by co-producer Steven Bordelon) who is leaving flyers all around town that read “Have you seen this Motherfucker,” ends up tying nicely into a conclusion that tests the limits of how far Eric’s estranged buddies would go for their revenge. That’s good storytelling, and combined with all of the positive attributes of this movie, it makes it rise well above its few missteps.

Available on a website that’s structured like a DVD menu with each installment of the feature-length movie broken into its own chapter, Shades of Gray is well-worth the wait for downloading time and I look forward to when it will be made available as a DVD to watch on a bigger screen. While J. Stoles expert shooting and camera moves are certainly discernible on the web, they would look THAT much better in full resolution. But don’t expect Shades of Gray in stores anytime soon, as its chances for distribution are greatly hindered by the widespread use of unlicensed music from the 1980’s. While the choice of songs such as The Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun,” “Come on Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners and A-Ha’s gem “Take on Me” verge on near genius, they destroy the movie’s chances for festival acclaim and retail sales. This is such a huge shame because Cowell has proved himself a talent to be reckoned with by creating an often side-splitting tale that balances absurdity, vulgarity and good, old-fashioned story craft with a deftness that’s usually only seen in higher budgeted fare. And dammit, he should be rewarded for such an outstanding achievement.

Five stars out of five.