Smash Cut
It’s
not often (ever) that I get to go to a big gala premiere of a film with the
filmmakers in attendance. As it turns
out there is good reason for that. I
guess Canada has passed Tortuga as the pirate capital of the world and they
don’t like to have films come out here before other places because pirates will
get them. Director Lee Demarbre told us this with a sad tone saying that he had to
really wrestle with the producers to allow them to have this one screening of
his own film at the cinema of which he is the proprietor. He says his distributors signed some
agreement with a company in France and Germany to have the film make it’s initial theatrical lap there.
However
since this film is completely shot in Ottawa Canada, I think it will serve to
really change people’s view of Canada as just another snowy safe haven for
pirates. This film will show them just
how much Canada’s capital doesn’t really investigate murders, has priests who
get blowjobs in white stretch limousines, crazy soldiers who arrange G.I. Joes
on a strip club stage to burn them, and has a bustling film industry producing
tax write-offs that double as body disposal cover-ups. Fuck, we are pirates.
Director
Lee DeMarbre is the proprietor of the cinema where I
see many cult films and has made a couple of films before such as Jesus
Christ: Vampire Hunter and Harry Knuckles and The
Tomb of the Aztec Mummy. Smash
Cut represents his highest budget film yet being made on a budget less than
half a million dollars. Yes, that’s right. If you know anything about what movies cost,
you know that you can’t even get a mason jar of Megan Fox’s hair grease to make
a cameo for half a million dollars. So
what does it get you? Let me tell you
what France and Germany already know.
The film stars David Hess from
the original Last House On The Left as a Bob
Dylan-looking Uwe Boll-type schlocky filmmaker named
Able Whitman. The film starts with a
pretty unrealistic scene where for some reason people have showed up to a
cinema dressed enthusiastically in costume for Whitman’s new movie which they
boo and say sucks. The audience walks
out leaving only Whitman to sit there alone having suffered the sad reality
that his film had the biggest cult devotion before anybody actually saw
it. Whitman goes further than Uwe Boll, not just challenging his critics to a boxing
match, but actually killing them and then using their corpses and body parts in
his films as props.
The
film follows the standard formula of somebody who is killing lots of people and
trying to keep it under wraps like Heathers or American Psycho 2: I
Shat On Your Kunis. You get your usual gags such as puns about
death and body parts, but the film does have some inspired moments such as how
Whitman has goofy yoga moments stretching and striking zen poses in the park to decompress after a hard day
of killing. I’ve never trusted those
yoga types anyway.
The
film probably reaches its comedic high point in a scene where Whitman kills a
guy with a harpoon on a city bus and tries to cover it up by making it look
like a suicide. David Hess as Whitman
has to carry most of this film, frequently talking to himself or to a dead
person and for the most part his manic intensity shows sincere effort. He allows himself to be put through near Crank
2 levels of humiliation when he has to dress up as characters from other
(way better) movies to commit murders.
Dressing as Quint from Jaws to kill a
guy with a harpoon was pretty good. I
liked that he had a scene slate rigged with teeth to chop people’s heads off,
but I don’t think he should’ve used it when he was dressed as The Man With No Name. He
should’ve found a way to stare that victim to death.
The
film co-stars Sasha Grey who was in the highbrow, artsy fartsy,
mesmerizing dull The Girlfriend Experience and according to IMDB she was
also in a Star Trek movie, but it must’ve been one of the ones with that
Picard guy because I don’t think I saw it.
I’m surprised she took this gig.
Grey shows the best acting potential of this cast but even she struggles
acting opposite a local guy named Jesse Buck playing some sort of Ace Ventura
type. I hope whatever dinner theatre
they got this guy from gave them a good toy with their happy meal.
Other
cast members include the guy who tears the tickets at the cinema where this
film was being shown. But fuck, that guy
was a natural. I’m not shitting you.
The
score is mostly stuff ripped off of other (way better) movies such as Once
Upon A Time In The West, Magnum Force, Shaft,
and The Psychic. And it kinda functions as a reverse Kill Bill in that it
uses the themes from movies with better production values. In a way it kinda
works because this is a movie about a crappy filmmaker who has delusions that
he is an artist on the level of those other (much better) movies too.
I’m
not really going to call this movie good or bad. I had a good time being there in the cinema
and having a laugh at something that half the people in the cinema had worked
on. On a schlocky DTV level it is
thoroughly enjoyable, but I’m pretty sure that once France and Germany see it
they won’t really feel so sexy and elite for having exclusive rights to this
thing.
If you liked this, check out these other related
readings:
Bloody Bird: A Film About an Owl
that Kills Actors with a Chainsaw
This film was also released as “Stagefright”,
“Deleria”, and “Aquarius”,
but you didn’t see it under those names either.
You could cut the tension
with a spoon.
Like The Wife Experience
only courtshipier!