Rating: C
Dir: Steven Aripez
Star: Joshua Lavelle Newman, Dani Adaliz, Alicia Blasingame, John Patrick Davis
I can’t remember how this one came across my radar. It might have been a Facebook post or a comment on the Tubi subreddit. It’s certainly obscure: at time of writing, it has just fifteen ratings and no reviews on the IMDb. After cutting his teeth on shorts, writer/director Aripez has made a feature which is roughly equal parts a love-letter to the days of video stores, a homage to Clerks (just look at that poster!), and a serial killer film. All of these elements have their moments: just not to an equal degree, and nor do they manage to gel into a consistent whole. It’s very chatty too – talk is cheap, after all – so you’ll need a hefty tolerance for that.
Terrence (Newman) runs a video store, the last vestige of a bygone, pre-streaming era, mostly out of his love for physical media. His somewhat girlfriend Gabby (Adaliz) helps out, and he has a cadre of loyal customers, including Olivia (Blasingame), a former Hollywood professional. One evening, she shows up, slightly tipsy, and gives him a DVD, the “director’s cut” of her movie, The Midnight Mangler. After watching it, Terrence is stunned to discover a connection to a slew of unsolved murders committed locally, by a killer nicknamed The Fiend. Is Olivia a serial killer? Despite Gabby’s doubts, he vows to confront Olivia when she returns the movie she rented. It doesn’t go as planned, instead revealing shocking information about Terrence’s past.
This doesn’t really show up until the final twenty minutes, and would have merited deeper exploration. Instead, you get an extended discussion regarding which horror movie some customers should watch first for their all-nighter: Re-Animator, The Wailing, Devil’s Candy or Jennifer’s Body. [The correct answer is, of course, Jennifer’s Body. Because then I could show up two hours late, and not have to sit through its badly over-rated ass] On the one hand, these are conversations I have had. On the other, they don’t move the story forward, or enhance the characters particularly much. It’s the kind of ambient chit-chat you had in Clerks. But there was no real plot goal there, and it’s very difficult to pull off without seeming like a Kevin Smith wannabe.
However, these were people I generally didn’t mind hanging out with. That goes a long way, and certainly is not always the case in low-budget cinema. The dialogue sounded natural, and was delivered effectively. Some scenes were basically two people talking to each other at some length – the opening discussion between Olivia and Terrence is 8-9 minutes long. Even though there were often only a couple of camera positions, these conversations were generally engaging and fairly interesting. Aripez also knows not to go beyond what his resources permit: there’s basically no special effects here. It all shows promise, with most of the foundations in place. I’d say it just needs to be in the service of something more plot-oriented, with a story which seems far less an afterthought.