Long-time readers of a wasted life — Are there any aside from
you, Mom? Oh, wait: you're dead, so there probably aren't any... — might
possibly, doubtfully, remember an amazing flick that truly stunned us back in
2015, the "video nasty" (Not!) entitled Frozen
Scream. Directed by a nobody named Frank Roach, the film was the first
filmic baby of Renee Harmon (18 May 1927 – 26 Nov 2006), a spectacularly
Teutonic-accented and untalented producer, scriptwriter, actor, whatever whose independent
productions universally display a signature anti-style that reveals her to be a
kind of cinema-obsessed Mrs. Miller.
Back when we wrote about
the memorable experience that is Frozen
Scream, among other things we said that the movie "is one of those
movies that is so bad, so incompetent, so unbelievably what-the-fuck that it
makes most Ed Wood films look professional in comparison. One is tempted to
simply write it off as 'what-were-they-thinking,
oh-they-needed-a-tax-deduction' trash, but, in truth, although an unbelievably
inept film, [Frozen Scream]
displays an earnestness shared by all those involved that, regardless of the
respective lack of talent, makes the viewer realize that the people involved in
the project were probably truly serious about it." It is a sentiment we
share with the shot-on-video bodycounter Bagman,
a film that has a few similarities with the shot-on-film sci-fi horror, Frozen Scream.
Like Frozen Scream, Bagman is
the product of a mover-and-shaker female filmmaker, in this case the
lower-echelon "Scream Queen" Stephanie Beaton who, much like Harmon,
decided to make star projects for herself instead of just waiting for any role
at all whenever luck would have it. (Luck is rare, as we all know.) Beaton,
like Harmon, is arguably "buxom and attractive",and like
Harmon she has her finger in every slice of the pie (script, production,
acting, whatever) of her first self-produced project. (Frozen Scream was likewise Harmon's first project, but its reported
budget of $20,000
probably exceeds The Bagman's by a
ten or twenty thousand.) Like Harmon's, Beaton's home products did little to
advance her movie career, which is perhaps why (like Harmon), Beaton's filmic
presence pretty much ended after a few years.*
*Imdb rumor has it that Beaton might be returning to genre films
soon with another shot-on-video, no-budget production entitled Beast
(planned release date unknown).
But whereas Frozen Scream's script quickly beams
into bonkersville, The Bagman's
bodycount narrative is predictably and boringly by-the-number — so much so
that, unlike any other movie we have viewed to date (including Shark
Week [2012] and Mega
Shark vs Crocosaurus [2010]), it literally put us to sleep. Indeed, we
missed whole swathes of the movie; not only that, but discussions held after
the four-person group screening where we watched The Bagman revealed that all four of us drifted off at one point or
another, enough so that not one of the seven deaths was caught by all four of
us at the same time.
So, one thing for sure:
the screening experience of The Bagman
is memorable in a completely different way to that of Frozen Scream... regrettably, not in a way that would make it
recommendable.
Like thousands of
bodycounters before it, The Bagman
plot concerns a group of people that cause a death that they keep secret but
then, ten years later, seems to be at the heart of the serial demise of the
members of the said group. Here, a unisex bunch of dick-ass classmates (including
the token Afro-American, who, naturally, turns out to be the first to go as an
adult) chase, harass, and then kill fellow student Jack Marshall, a
badly-scarred youth whose ugly disfigurement is the result of a house fire that
killed his parents.* But, wait! After covering his face with a burlap bag and
drowning him and swearing themselves into secrecy, the body disappears almost
in front of their eyes! (Not that any of them seem to notice or care.)
*"To be clear about how
unsympathetic these characters are, they are picking on a kid who survived a
fire that burned his house to the ground and killed both his parents. Yes,
they're tormenting an orphaned, homeless kid with skin grafts. [Haunted
Monkey Paw Island]"
The whole introductory
scene, an incompetently shot and acted reiteration of a generic, basic opening
found in films, all undoubtedly better, ranging from before Homicidal (1961 / trailer) or [put title
of your choice here] and up to well past Prom
Night (1980 / trailer)
or I Know What You Did Last Summer
(1996 / trailer) or
[put title of your choice here], is as "professional" and
non-effective as the rest of the movie, which takes place ten years later. That
part of the flick opens with an oddly laughable sex scene on a cooking stove
during which final gal Sue Creswell (Stephanie Beaton) displays her bodaciously
proportioned chesticles before turning harpy and breaking up with her loser
artist boyfriend. This leads her to returning back to her hometown and
reuniting with her frenemies and the sudden appearance of the Bagman (Ron Ford
of Camp
Blood [2000]), a fat guy wearing the same bag over his face that
Marshall "died" wearing, and the ten-little-Indian progression of
dead young adults plus doggy and white-trash lady that follows.
We awoke for a few deaths,
including that of the doggy, but missed for example the double deed that
followed the film's second sex scene (image of the bra-wearing female victim above),
which we slept through. Nothing that we saw in The Bagman when awake was filmed in a way that evidenced directorial
competence or creative aspirations, and the acting ranged from passable (the
girl who bites the dust in the cemetery was OK) to jaw-droppingly horrible
(some white guy who dies). Amidst it all, it must be said that Stephanie Beaton
comes across the best: she never completely drops the thespian baton, even when
she tips into camp, and at least for the scenes we caught between dozes she was
as believable as a mildly talented local-TV actress, if somewhat fuller in
figure. (Damn! What chesticles!)
Here at a
wasted life, we generally admire people who have a dream and try to
follow it in hope of achieving their own real-life Horatio Alger story or
simply because they, like a true outsider artist, have an unquenchable need for
artistic production. Beaton definitely falls more into the former than the
latter, and possibly as a result the movie, an obvious attempt to sustain or
advance her dream vocation (i.e., an extremely paltry cinematic career),
displays little true creative talent or any sort of artistic goal. Thus, while
she is to be lauded for at least trying to attempt something, she did anything
but make even a half-way decent purse from a sow's ear. But then, she also
didn't make a worthwhile mess, either. The real problem, to return to what we
wrote about Frozen Scream (see the
second paragraph above), is that unlike Renee Harmon's first foray into
creating a non-existent career, as cringingly horrible as The Bagman is, it isn't as entertaining as a cringingly horrible
film should be.
For us, it will remain in
our memory as the film that put us asleep (something even Scent of a Woman [1992 / trailer] didn't do, but
then we walked out on that one). That is not a memory that instigates a
positive recommendation...
So, in other words: don't
bother watching this mess… Hell, why even waste your time with the trailer (below)?
Like Frozen Scream, Bagman is
the product of a mover-and-shaker female filmmaker, in this case the
lower-echelon "Scream Queen" Stephanie Beaton who, much like Harmon,
decided to make star projects for herself instead of just waiting for any role
at all whenever luck would have it. (Luck is rare, as we all know.) Beaton,
like Harmon, is arguably "buxom and attractive",
and like
Harmon she has her finger in every slice of the pie (script, production,
acting, whatever) of her first self-produced project. (Frozen Scream was likewise Harmon's first project, but its reported
budget of $20,000
probably exceeds The Bagman's by a
ten or twenty thousand.) Like Harmon's, Beaton's home products did little to
advance her movie career, which is perhaps why (like Harmon), Beaton's filmic
presence pretty much ended after a few years.*
* Imdb rumor has it that Beaton might be returning to genre films
soon with another shot-on-video, no-budget production entitled Beast
(planned release date unknown).
But whereas Frozen Scream's script quickly beams
into bonkersville, The Bagman's
bodycount narrative is predictably and boringly by-the-number — so much so
that, unlike any other movie we have viewed to date (including Shark
Week [2012] and Mega
Shark vs Crocosaurus [2010]), it literally put us to sleep. Indeed, we
missed whole swathes of the movie; not only that, but discussions held after
the four-person group screening where we watched The Bagman revealed that all four of us drifted off at one point or
another, enough so that not one of the seven deaths was caught by all four of
us at the same time.
So, one thing for sure:
the screening experience of The Bagman
is memorable in a completely different way to that of Frozen Scream... regrettably, not in a way that would make it
recommendable.
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