The film opens with our hero, Charlie, with a gun in his mouth. He has it in and out of there several times but, alas, decides to save us form an early night and chooses to keep on living - well if you can call it that.
Charlie is a nasty piece of work and has many fantasies which may or not be real. He has a threesome with a couple of hookers before strangling them. He offers poor old Karen Black, in what was her last role, help in fixing her car before smashing her face in with a hammer. That scene was plain nasty and if it wasn’t for the terrible makeup, I’d have been quite disturbed by it.
All the while Charlie is filming his activities and offering us his ponderous narration. He says his film is intended to ‘help us bury the dead things inside of us’ which is very generous of him, but frankly, he shouldn’t have bothered. The film uses Charlie’s footage as part of the narrative so we get lots of static-filled VHS shots and focus that looks like the steady-cam was on a bungee rope. I’d imagine this process was to draw us into Charlie’s world and to give us a voyeur’s view of the action - well that and it’s cheap.
Charlie makes a friend who is also weird and wants to be hurt. I may have misread this but I think the friend didn’t exist except in Charlie’s mind as no one else reacts to him when he’s perving about, and Charlie acts out the friend’s fantasies. Things may look up when Charlie gets a nice girlfriend. Again I’m not clear if the sociopath is imagining things or she’s a hooker, but she is quite game for most things, usually involving strangulation.
At times it looks like Charlie will take it too far and the last elongated scene is of him filming himself strangling her with the film intercut with him being beaten up as a child by his Dad, the Stunt Man himself, Steve Railsback. Seems a strange thing for a family movie to be made of, so again it may all be playing out inside Charlie’s frazzled brain. Will the ‘why did she agree to be in this?’ girlfriend survive and will Charlie find the gun he was playing with at the start? I can help to look!
This was a God awful film that looked like some dreadful film school project - cheap and with every cut and effect filter you can imagine. Amazingly IMDb says it won some awards - must have been ‘Least Use of Focus in a Feature Presentation’. There was no attempt to engage you with the characters with scenes dragging on for an age in a clearly improvised and meandering manner.
You could see art house types lapping it up, but it just grated throughout with its industrial noises and strobing lights setting the scene for people to have rough sex with their clothes on. Prudish yet extreme is a strange mix.
The slightly upbeat ending and reveal came about 80 minutes too late for me to care and I’m just glad it’s done. Let’s never speak of it again.
Best Bit : I love a good skirt - (way more than this stinker) 6/23
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