Rating: D
Dir: Paul McAroni
Star: Dimas Bardales, James Baglini, Ray DiNitto, Michael McCarthy
Well, Tubi. You have certainly outdone yourself with this one. I wonder if companies would be happy to know their adverts were appearing in the middle of this one> It’s definitely a bit of cultural dissonance to go from a woman having a fetus graphically carved out of her abdomen, by an attacker who then jacks off in a bowl, and smears his cum around the gaping wound to… “Homes.com is the best.” Well played, Tubi. Well played. The killer in this case is Alex Burgess (Bardales) – and I strongly suspect that name comes from the protagonist and author of A Clockwork Orange. The film is littered with these, and it’s not exactly subtle about it.
He is a deeply disturbed killer, arrested after a mugger makes a very poor choice of victim, and gets his throat hacked out in response. That’s just the last in a long string of deeply brutal incidents, mostly involving violence of a sexual kind. To be honest, the effects on these were variable: a lot of the time, the polystyrene mannequins standing in for the victim were very obvious. Yet I do have to acknowledge the sick mind which came up with some of the ideas here, including burning hot coals being stuffed… Well, three guesses, and I’m going to imagine you won’t need all three. Credit also to David Ellesmere and Timothy Fife for a synthwave score which looks to have got lost on its way to an actual movie.
Unfortunately, the bad here is pretty goddamn terrible. That would involve most of the performances. Bardales gets a vague pass, and interestingly, this is one of the few portrayals of a black serial killer I can remember. Detective Kemper (Baglini) is marginally okay. Lt. Gumb (DiNitto) – I told you so about the names – is not, but is Oscar calibre compared to some of the people we get further down the credits. That I was genuinely pleased when we went back to explicit sexual violence should give you some idea. Not that the script gives the actors much to work with; it’s clear McAroni put all his efforts into the nastiness. Nowhere is this clearer than the ending, which gives off big “Ah, fuck it. Can’t be bothered” energy.
There are only a couple of scenes which demonstrate any talent of note. One sees Gumb, a foul-mouthed jerk whose use of the N-word would give Quentin Tarantino pause, abusing a black woman. Turns out to be an entirely consensual S&M relationship. In the other, the cops are interviewing the secretary of a PI who had been looking into the case, before Alex took him out. She randomly whips out her baps for three seconds. I laughed, and they were nice. However, it is too clear to the viewer, the film is going out there with the deliberate aim of offending the viewer. Once you realize this, the entire endeavour doesn’t have much point to it.