Zero 2 (Lithuania, 2010)

We caught this flick under the title Shoot 'Em Down, not knowing that it's actually a sequel to a Lithuanian flick made four years earlier by the same director, Emilis Velyvis, entitled Zero. Alyvine Lietuva (2006). The AKA title of this flick here, the sequel, is an obvious play upon Shoot 'Em Up (2007 / trailer), another kill-happy, bullet-ridden film which, in all truth, we have yet to manage to catch despite the presence of the babalicious Monica Bellucci. And since we haven't seen Zero. Alyvine Lietuva, either, and have no idea how this flick and that one interconnect (if at all), we'll just approach Shoot 'Em Down here as a stand-alone movie.

When Shoot 'Em Down hit the film festivals in 2010, it was picked up by the L.A.-based Epic Pictures, but it seems that they chose to lock the movie away for it has yet to get an official English-language release. Too bad, 'cause as misogynist as the movie is, it is also a relatively funny if contrived Tarantino cum Guy Richie wannabe that would be popular with the male market segment and, perhaps, less sensitive females or those who are husband-beaten. A few people must have seen it, however, 'cause director Emilis Velyvis' follow-up project, Redirected (2014 / trailer), now has some international names in it — if you count Vinnie Jones (of Slipstream [2005]) and a few other even less well-known English faces as "international", that is.

Told in a typically Tarantino non-linear fashion, Shoot 'Em Down is set in a violent world in a big city small enough that everyone seems to cross every else's paths just by chance (much like in Pulp Fiction [1994 / trailer], where in the middle of Los Angeles, with its millions and millions of inhabitants, crime boss Marsellus Wallace [Ving Rhames of Day of the Dead (2008), Zombie Apocalypse (2011), Piranha 3D (2010) and Piranha DD (2012)] just happens to opportunely cross a crosswalk directly in front of boxer Butch Coolidge [Bruce Willis], whom Marsellus wants dead). In Shoot 'Em Down, it is fairly certain that if two people who have never seen each other before meet briefly in a gas station or fast-food joint, elsewhere in the movie they'll meet again and a dead body will suddenly be involved, a dead body of someone that in all likelihood also crossed the path of some other character elsewhere and earlier in the movie. Not very believable, needless to say, but it makes for a streamlined narrative and some good laughs — and a lot of dead bodies.

Set in a world where no one is clean, the basic plot involves a drug heist, two killers contracted to get the drugs back, a bunch of people involved with a daily soap, and a variety of other people, mostly women, connected to the various testosterone-heavy men all leaving a trail of blood behind them. Everyone's paths cross bloodily and ferociously, and the bodies pile up in one tasteless and meanly hilarious scene after the other. There's nothing remotely PC or elegant about the humor in this flick, but if you're not squeamish about stuff like that you could well find yourself laughing throughout the movie.

The first sight gag in the opening scene of a cop selling some SWAT uniforms to some low-scale gangsters more or less sets the tone for how women are viewed in the movie — they're there as sex toys — and elsewhere it becomes apparent that in the world the film moves in, it's also really not that bad if you occasionally knock 'em up the side of the head. (Although one woman, at least, does take offense to the latter and takes some pretty extreme action — OK in our book.) And you know what? In this flick, it's also more or less OK to cut the silicone bags out of... uh, well, see the movie yourself to find out that.

That's about it, actually. There is no message to the movie, no subliminal text, no political statement (unless you count a blatant undercurrent of misogyny as a political statement). It's just a tight if contrived, violent and sickly funny flick that is shot well, edited well, and for the most part acted well.

Shoot 'Em Down never really stops to let you, the viewer, breath or think but instead barrels straight on down the highway and over the dead bodies until the final scene, tossing every possible tasteless, brutal, blood-spattered, and sexist sight gag and joke and body part at you as it goes. Once or twice the narrative stumbles — we really don't know why the one guy didn't emasculate the bathrobe-wearing hitman when he had the chance — but before you can really think about it the movie is already miles further. Shoot 'Em Down definitely ain't for the ladies, but the rest of you might enjoy it. (We did — our other half didn't.) One thing for sure, however, is that Shoot 'Em Down sure makes Lithuania look like the kind of place you don't want to visit — as did, for that matter, J. Jackie Baier's tragic documentary film Julia (2013).

Soft Target / Crooked (USA, 2006)

To put it bluntly, Soft Target — aka Crooked — isn't exactly a masterpiece of action. True, we did enjoy watching it — what male isn't made happy by naked love pillows (plastic or not) and shooting guns and an occasional hearty belly-laugh? — but never once did the movie ever transcend the level of low grade sub-mediocrity that every scene, every aspect of the movie, exudes.

Admittedly, we did have hopes, at first, for despite the flimsy familiarity of the plot — to quote imdb: "two police detectives must protect a beautiful call girl from mob hitmen and a crooked cop" — the lineup of headlining names is impressive. But, at the latest, when the great Fred Williamson, as Dt. Jack Paxton, exits five minutes into what is at best a glorified guest appearance (done either as a favor or to pay a bar tab), we knew we had once again popped a loser into the DVD player. Luckily, however, the loser of a film was at least entertainingly funny, if always unintentionally... and there's nothing we like more than a crappy film that's funny crap.

Our first laugh came when the Afro-American dude (Maurice Lamont) staked out in front of the hotel actually said "Two years more and I'm out." We knew then and there he would die — and two minutes later, he did, along with Fred Williamson and some dozen others, in a hail of bullets. And though the face of the crooked cop is never shown, the early voiceover opening the movie already reveals the mystery — and thus renders the whole "Who could it be?" aspect of the movie a farce.

Hero Number One, Danny Tyler (Don 'The Dragon' Wilson of Night Hunter [1996 / trailer]) shows up a minute later, in a bar scene that looks tacked on from another movie, and soon thereafter he, the by-the-book man, gets partnered by Chief John Rouse (Gary Busey of Piranha 3DD [2012], A Crack in the Floor [2001] and The Gingerdead Man [2005 / trailer]) with the break-the-rules man Phil Yordan (Olivier Gruner) to find Angel (DianaKauffman, of Ted Bundy [2002 / trailer] and Glass Trap [2005 / trailer]), the hooker with plastic mammaries who saw it all. (Kauffman, by the way, followed this flick with an appearance in the video World's Sexiest Nude Women [2007], where everything she has totally pales in comparison to Erica Campbell's 100% naturals.) That the hooker also has a heart of gold is of course to be expected, as Soft Target is not only very much by-the-number but a romantic interest is needed for Danny the Dragon and his dragon. Mr. Break-the-Rules, on the other hand, has a stewardess at hand — and a very well-earning one, too, going by the look of her house.

The high points of the movie, if not the most professionally executed, are indeed the silicone mountains, which are displayed in longer nude scenes than are normal for contemporary flicks of this ilk. Likewise, we do admit having a soft spot that gets hard for Olivier Gruner (of Re-Generator [2010 / trailer], Nemesis [1992 / trailer] and Savate [1995 / French trailer), who gets naked for a tub scene but, regrettably, totally fails to deliver the full frontal we've dreamt of for years. The fight scenes, on the other hand, are far between and all extremely disappointing and disjointed affairs that fail to deliver any thrill, and while the background is filled with oddly familiar faces — Martin Kove and Bret Roberts, for example — they are not really given all that much to do.

There really isn't anything to recommend about the Soft Target in regard to drama, tension, acting, narrative, direction or even action, but we did laugh a lot — deep, heartfelt belly laughs that only true jokes and religious people can normally give rise to. We don't watch many action films, but of all those that we have, this is probably one of the most cheap-looking, badly acted ones yet — it makes The Tracker (2000), for example, look like a masterpiece of cinema in comparison.

Hampered with its dull, poorly executed fight scenes and unfocused shootouts, a love-story subplot as convincing as plastic flowers, and way toooooo much background character information (hooker with heart of gold, straight cop with a corrupt suicide dad cop, etc.), Soft Target is truly a fiasco of an action film. Were it not that it kept us laughing, we'd probably be yelling for the director's head. But it did keep us laughing, and is you have an appreciation for the absurd, the stupid, the bad — Look! Don in a Tree! Look, the hooker loves Don! Watch her run away instead of back in the house! Look! Look! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!  — Soft Target might make you laugh, too.

On the other hand, you might just see it as the piece of low-grade, sorry-ass shit it is. A wasted cast, if you get down to it, and though everyone involved has done worse, they have also all done better — and could and should do better.

Short Film: Happiest Monster (USA, 2006)

Like so many shorts, we stumbled upon this little "lo-fi" treasure on YouTube.

It was a foundation year project of Jonathan Kim, made at Cal Arts. According to his Linked-In page, Kim, who attended Cal Arts from 2005 – 2009 and got a BA in character animation, is currently a senior animator at Lab Zero Games in Los Angeles, the "forward-thinking and retro-minded [...] independent game development studio founded by the original team that brought you Skullgirls". Whatever.
Kim seems aka "PP-Infinity". He has a Tumblr site and a presence at YouTube, whence the film below comes.
The plot, as explained at Online Short Films: "The story of a lucky girl who chances upon a visit by a monster and experiences the change of her life! Flying through the everlasting sky, euphoria awaits everyone who embarks on this journey with the happiest monster!"
The short tale presented, on a symbolic level, is that of a little girl who, as we all are told we should, confronts fears. But, unlike you're told as a child, doing that doesn't always help much in the end.
"With music by the very talented Mr. Andrew Toups." Enjoy.

Film Noir (Serbia, 2007)

Last week at our weekly bad film night, for some unexplainable reason we decided not to watch the direct-to-DVD horror film starring Uri Geller entitled Sanatorium aka Diagnosis (2001 / German trailer) and, instead, pulled this totally unknown B&W feature-length animation film out of our pile of mystery movies on DVD.

What can we say other than that it ruined the night: instead of some hilariously crappy movie as expected, we found ourselves watch a truly engrossing and first-rate if flawed and obviously low budget movie. We would have been like totally pissed off had the movie not captured our attention so thoroughly and been so entertaining (in a good way). It is without a doubt the best B&W animated film noir we've seen since, well, about a half year ago when we caught the animated French sci-fi noir, Renaissance (2006 / trailer). That film is a good one in itself, but Film Noir definitely out-noirs Renaissance, sometimes to the point of almost becoming a satire of the genre. Unlike Renaissance, however, which is totally B&W, Film Noir borrows a page from the far more Baroque  Sin City (2005 / trailer) in that there are occasional flashes of color — women's red nails or lipstick, red-rimmed gunshot wounds, yellow cabs, etc. — amidst the B&W shadows of a world long gone wrong.

Like the much flashier, better-scripted and bigger-budgeted star vehicle Sin City, the obviously low budget Film Noir is almost as much of an action flick as it is a noir. But Sin City is far more a comic nook than Film Noir, although Film Noir does suffer from some comic book plotting and action sequences. But it is a sign of quality that Film Noir works so well despite such flaws. (One action scene in it does actually go over the edge — though the film manages to recover — and brings to mind the joke in Last Action Hero [1993 / trailer] about how no matter how many guns are shot at Arnie in the film world, he never gets hit by a single bullet: in Film Noir, there is an outrageous car vs. helicopter chase in which our hero is out-driving a machine-gun-wielding bad guy in a helicopter who shoots hundreds of bullets at him at point-blank range but only hits the car's hood seven times. An unintentional joke that leads to a small scene thereafter at a used car lot that once again reinforces an idea that laces the entire movie: everyone is corrupt, and everyone can be bought.)

Film Noir utilizes the quintessential noir plot device of amnesia, a favorite of traditional noirs —   Somewhere in the Night (1946 / trailer), The Crooked Way (1949 / scene), High Wall (1947 / trailer), Black Angel (1946 / trailer) or Street of Chance (1942)*, anyone? — as well as contemporary neo-noirs (Shutter Island [2010 / trailer], Memento [2000 / trailer] or Dark City [1998 / trailer], anyone?). Our hero awakens next to a dead body, a cop, and has no memory of who he is or how he got where he is, and then spends more than half of the movie trying to find out his identity. Confronted by duplicitous but hot-to-fuck babes, a shady doctor, a missing private eye, and scores of hitmen out to kill him, he begins to realize that whoever he is, he ain't a nice guy. And finally, once he solves the mystery of his identity, he is no better off than before and must now figure out a way of getting out of the whole mess alive.

* Street of Chance puts a twist on the ol' amnesia plot by beginning with a man awakening from his amnesia, only to be in danger from whatever it was that happened in his other life, which he in turn now no longer remembers.

Film Noir is set in a quasi-contemporary world complete with mobile phones and an internet that supplies info better and quicker than that of today, but at the same time the "back-projected" cityscape often has an oddly 40s feel. Yes, the action takes place in the ultimate noir city, Los Angeles,* a place that always rains at night unless you happen to be driving a convertible (which, as everyone knows, you can also leave parked in a bad part of town for days with its top down and keys in the glove compartment and not have stolen). It's a lonely world, one in which the women might be hot to hop in bed with you, but also won't bat an eye ratting on you once they've had their big O. It is almost emblematic of that world that the only woman who turns out to be "true", or "honest" and "trustworthy", is also the one who's most fucked up. (That said, we personally have never met a junkie — and we've known more than we care to admit — who was any of the three.)

* We doubt that anyone who has lived or lives in LA and who has enjoyed the experience of driving its empty roads, particularly in the industrial areas, late at night would disagree with this statement.

It is, in the end, a bit difficult to write about Film Noir without giving away too much of the events, and in turn it must be said that the movie is more a case of matter over substance than anything else. Many aspects of the narrative are pure baloney, of the level of low-grade pulp plotting, and the whole movie probably wouldn't work if it had been done live action. But as an animated movie, Film Noir bathes in its source and creates a mood and rhythm that underscores the various themes — duplicity being the main one, as almost every character of the movie has a hidden side — that drift in and out of the movie. The animation itself is already a bit old fashioned, but this is actually an advantage, as it acts a bit like the mesmerizing patina that old age lends the B&W classic noirs. The jazzy soundtrack, redolent of lascivious cigarette smoke and whiskey, might definitely be more neo-noir than noir, but it underscores the visuals and events excellently, adding that special spice to the pervading mood of the movie.

The big question this film leaves in its wake is: Why the fuck hasn't anyone heard of it yet? It should be a cult hit, but it's more unknown than any given Ralph Bakshi flick. Time for that to change.