Rating: D+
Dir: Robert D. Parham, Rene Margary
Star: Elise Hollywood Evans, Marlon Kenoly, Josh Alvin, Gary Turner
After being the first person to review Cocaine Werewolf, I appear to have become the go-to reviewer for Cocaine <ANIMATE OBJECT> movies. There is certainly scope here, with roaches being particularly icky. They’ve been used before, all the way back to 1996’s Joe’s Apartment, and as recently as Khepri Cockroach Tide, from 2020. Between the scurrying and the antennae, they’re bad enough as is. Add cocaine to the mix and… Well, you can imagine. In fact, you’re going to have to imagine, because this film doesn’t do a very good job of living up to the potential. While it does contain an adequate amount of cocaine, it is very much in need of more cockroach.
That aspect of the film takes place in a drug stash-house, where Skee (Turner), his friend Jamal (Alvin), and Skee’s girlfriend Tanisha (Evans) have gone to complete a drug deal on the orders of local boss Ra’Manga. Along with them is Ra’Manga’s enforcer, Omar (Kenoly), which is awkward, because he recently dumped Tanisha. The location is scuzzy in the extreme, with matters and tempers not helped when Omar discovers he is missing a kilo of coke. No prizes for guessing where that has gone. However, a major problem is the film doesn’t fully buy into to this. While it only runs 69 minutes, the makers still feel the need to drop in a lot of other non-roach related stuff. At least Cocaine Werewolf had a decent amount of cocaine werewolf.
Here, for example, we have a slew of other things, ranging from the other half of the intended drug deal trying to get lucky at a bar, through Tanisha’s young daughter coping without Mom, to a faux talk-show (Evans playing the host) called The Diva Big Deal Show, with which all the characters seem obsessed. To call these elements “hit or miss” would be very charitable, though I was amused by the director own-branding himself onto chips and cereal in the film, e.g. “Parham Puffs”, complete with commercial. The Diva’s brand of perfume, with a list of side-effects which would give Thalidomide pause, also ends up surprisingly relevant to the plot. These are the exception though: too often, these elements feel bolted on from a different film.
Regular readers will know of my hatred of bad audio, a trait which only increases as my ears age, and this is guilty as charged. It’s odd, because some scenes are clearly dubbed, indicating Parham and Margary are aware a) of the concept, and b) that some scenes need it. That they left untouched others, where the sound was apparently recorded under hostage conditions, is perplexing. Parham has been making features for several years, and I’d expect him to know this. But I think the main difference is, for all its flaws, Werewolf felt like it committed to the lunacy of its concept, this almost seems embarrassed by it, with the other aspects more distraction than enhancement.