Rating: B-
Dir: David Axe
Star: Morgan Shaley Renew, Caylin Sams, Raj Karottukunnel, Mandy Applegate
There’s a case to be made that this is the kind of navel-gazing cinema which is self-indulgent. It’s a movie about movie-making, after all, at points becoming so meta that my head span. So, wait: we are watching a making-of documentary about the production of the film within the film, directed by the movie’s director? It is true to say that you will get more from this if you are at least aware of the world of low-budget cinema. Witness this deadpan discussion concerning the talents of a special effects artist:
– Sam rigged up an entire quadruple amputation effect with nothing but an hour’s notice, expired latex and a bike pump.
– How’d that work?
– Fixed it in post.
The central character is Chloe (Renew), a director of such fare as Vampire Shark 3-D, and the Space Babes franchise. While working on the latter, she collapses, and is diagnosed with a brain tumour, which will kill her in six months or so. Desperate to leave a better legacy, she convinces her long-suffering producer to fund a final project: Die Standing Up, a fantasy Western about a woman hunting a monster. Oh, and a killer tree. What follows is part that movie – the first ten minutes are spent in a screening room, leisurely watching footage from it – part the struggle involved in its creation, from casting through set building, to the problems with bringing the lethal flora to life (top). Through it all, Chloe ploughs on, painfully aware of her impending demise.
It’s this very human core which does (mostly) stop the film from toppling over into pretension, because we can all relate to her situation. The older I get, the more I find myself thinking about death, and this doesn’t pull its punches. Chloe’s best friend tells her, “We pretend we’ve got forever. But not you. Not anymore. No more guessing games, no more fucking around. You’re a dead woman.” It’s rare to have a film so committed to killing off its lead character by the end. Despite this grim situation, it’s rarely depressing, with the bleakness frequently relieved by some dark humour, such as the set builder lying his teeth off about progress to Chloe, and more concerned about where he should send the invoice.
I did feel it ran long, a hair shy of two hours. There’s what feels like the perfect end point about ninety minutes in. But the movie then continues to meander on, mostly in Die Standing Up mode, and offering significantly diminished returns before achieving some degree of redemption in the final shot. This may be a result of the film being, as the end credits proudly proclaim, “Written, directed, produced, shot, edited and mixed” by Axe. Yet this is likely also what allows it to be defiantly, weirdly interesting. Later in the credits, we learn the budget was $44,000 (as well as, ‘If you’re thinking of making your own movie: don’t.’). Proof, once more, that creativity does not require a huge budget to work.