Reviews

When I started watching this I found it a bit too frightening, because I'm an Indian man, and this could so easily happen to me, or any of us.

The show deals with the issue of assumed culpability, especially nowadays against people of Muslim heritage (or who look Muslim), and also the systematic criminalisation of the poor, as fodder to be pumped into the for-profit jail system.

But the show is surprisingly even-handed. True, cops need to make their quotas, but they're not all evil dumbasses - they've seen it all and they can read who's a killer and who's an innocent kid in the blink of an eye. But someone has to be charged, and it just so happens that oftentimes that someone turns out to be someone non-white.

John Turturro's arrival in the first episode was one of the best hero introductions I have seen in years and years. It was like he showed up on screen and I breathed an audible sigh of relief - John Turturro's here now and everything's going to be OK - or is it? He's a drunk, fuckup, ambulance chaser who's down on his luck with no one looking after him. Can he really save the day?

The show has already made me cry a few times - like when Nasir's mother made him some home food when they were first allowed to visit him, and she took it there so carefully, but the guards wouldn't let her give it to him.

The casting on this show is outstanding. John Turturro it goes without saying, but this is definitely Riz Ahmed's best ever performance - even better than in Nightcrawler. And it's lovely to see the wonderful Glenne Headley again.

I have only watched the first four episodes, so don't have any idea how the story will unfold, but so far this is one of the best new shows I have seen for ages.

ER is my all time favourite TV show, but this episode was TERRIBLE. I was just about squirming in my seat with embarrassment at the horrible mismanagement - poor direction, dreary story, and most of all, awful music. But if the artistic intent was to provoke the audience into committing suicide to make it stop then they scored 10 out of 10.

The pre-title montage of couples in bed was grotesque. The political commentary was ham-fisted. The "angelic" background music made me want to scream, as did the ordination ceremony music.

In fairness, even the best talents don't get everything right every time - but it seemed like in this episode they got nothing right all the time.

Rossini said of Wagner's music that there were "lovely moments, but awful quarters of an hour". Steve Jobs was similar, except it didn't have any lovely moments.

Oh for Pete's sake how did this film come into existence? And then be nominated for, and WIN!!! multiple awards. It was rubbish.

Aaron Sorkin's script, constructed from his standard walk-and-talks and stand-still-and-talks, was laughable. Danny Boyle's attempts to tart it up with dutch angles, flash cuts and non-diegetic elements were pitiful. The hoped-for similarity to Birdman was just tragic.

Besides that, it was obviously one of those incestuously chummy films where the above-the-line luvvies had fun while the paying audience of commoners had NONE.

Absolutely pathetic!

I have had mixed feelings about Tarantino and his films since the outset. I don't like his his world-view (sadists are cool, victims are contemptible) and think he's a one-trick-pony whose every film relies on a single mechanism (manipulating the audience into applauding cruel violence). But, that said, I can hardly deny the fact that Tarantino was a seminal voice of late 20th century cinema, and that some of the fan-boy adulation is warranted. 

Regarding Tarantino as a persona, for me the elephant in the room is how sad it is that an obviously gay man is not brave enough (in 2016!) to come out, when he would be celebrated with hysterical adulation were he to do so. Instead he makes film after film that manage to be camp as a row of tents yet grotesquely homophobic at the same time. 

On to the film. The old Hollywood saw says that "a movie with a message is like a gift with the price tag still on". Well, The Hateful Eight is like a vulgar nouveau riche snob swanning into a poor relative's humble home, bestowing a gift far too expensive to be reciprocated, then going on and on about exactly how much it cost. 

We all got the message - America's history of slavery and its relationship to the civil war has cast long shadows that affect black/white relations in the US to this day. The symbolism could hardly be more on-the-nose. All 4 of the horses of the stagecoach for Caucasians were black, but SLJ had a black horse and a white horse working together. And there was a chess board with black and white pieces, but only white men ever sat in the two chairs. And the single Mexican character said people had tried to teach him the rules but they never stuck, nevertheless he wouldn't mind watching from the sidelines etc. etc. 

Regarding the overuse of the n word: kudos to Jennifer Lawrence for turning down the role of Daisy. I can sort of visualise that meeting - she took one look at Daisy's first line, "Howdy n****r", and said "Um, what are the shoot dates? Oh no, the thing is, I might have a headache on those days, but thanks for considering me". 

Anyway, the film overall was a fairly entertaining, modestly clever, sensationalist genre film, and usually I like those. If it had been an hour shorter, and shot by some scrappy teenagers on a budget of $90k (or even $350k as an upper estimate) like Raimi's The Evil Dead, I would be praising The Hateful Eight to the skies. But it wasn't made under those circumstances - it was made on a budget of $44 million by a veteran Hollywood darling director with every resource imaginable at his disposal. 

What annoyed me most was the preposterous decision to shoot what was effectively a stage play on 65mm film. That's like hiring a supertechnocrane to film a pack shot. There weren't even that many wide shots - whole 15 minute sections of the film were pretty much just MCU singles and 2 shots filmed in studio. 

I can only imagine that it was a deliberate industry in-joke that Tarantino decided to make a movie that was almost completely "tell, don't show". The script went:

Actor: You don't know about (character X)? Well I'll tell you about (character X).

or,

Another actor: Hey, don't I know you? You're (character Y). Didn't you (blah blah blah) at (blah)?

In fact it was nearly all verbal exposition, right the way through to the end of the film.

Regarding the acting. Well, they're all great actors, so I can only take it that they were delivering their performances as per Tarantino's direction. But the absurd macho posturing by everyone involved (including Jennifer Jason Leigh) ended up looking like a bunch of drag queens throwing shade in a vogue femme dramatics battle. 

To paradoxically counter that, the most egregious homophobia in this one was SLJ's goading of Bruce Dern's character with the anecdote (amazingly, some back-story actually shown on screen, presumably to allow Tarantino to get in some "shocking" full frontal male nudity) about forcing his son to suck his dick, as if a white man having to suck a black man's cock were the *most* humiliating and shameful thing that any human being has ever had to do. Of course we understand that this is how SLJ's character hoped Bruce Dern's character would consider the scenario, but I don't fully buy it - it seemed more to me like the same projection of Tarantino's own internal homophobia that he has trotted out in pretty much every one of his films so far as a sort of public therapy session on a transparent throwaway account. 

I can imagine Tarantino sitting down thinking: OK, I've got grind-house, I've got spaghetti western, I've got blaxploitation. But something's missing… I know, let's throw in a chronology shift, a bit of voice-over (uncredited of course, in my new "manly" voice that I can pull off for a few seconds at a time), and see something we've already seen, but from a different angle. Ah god, there are no car boots available... oh, I know, let's have that guy Charly hide in the coal bunker so I can get a low angle shot of someone opening the door from the outside. I've got two more films to do to get to 10 which seems like an iconic number - I guess I can stretch these elements out until then - if it worked once, repeat it, that's what I always say (and do). 

Overall The Hateful Eight was not bad - acceptably entertaining in fact - but it was certainly not good, and definitely not worthy of its current 8.1 stars. I'm giving it 5 out of 10 because it was just OK and nothing more or less.

I'm trying to comprehend how such a milquetoast excuse for a theatrical release film came into existence. I imagine there was some type of meeting that went like this.

Exec: The Meryl wants to do a role where she plays rock guitar, and Mamie is only allowed to be in A-LIST MOVIES WITH A-LIST PEOPLE. Round up whatever Oscar winners you can find who need a quick couple of million.

... A bit later

Exec: Diablo, HIIIII! Write something.

Diablo Cody: Um, like what?

Exec: Oh, it doesn't matter. Just string together English words that follow each other. Oh, oh, I know. Make it about a mother daughter relationship because then it will be a bit like Postcards from the Edge - but now we have real life mother and daughter actors available. And make Mamie's hair be all messy at the beginning, because we think she can manage to act that.

Jonathan Demme: What do you want me to do?

Exec: Well, maybe tell someone to turn on the camera at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day shout CUT - do whatever you like in between.

OK, so this wasn't the most egregious example I can think of where a movie was made apparently as a paid vacation for the madly-remunerated ATLs while the audience, spending their own hard earned money had zero amount of fun (A Good Year, The American, Last Vegas etc.), but it's up there in the same league.

Feeble.

Step aside "The Room"! There's a new King of unintentionally laughable patheticness in town, and its name is "Exodus: Gods and Kings".

I watched this with my buddy on our weekly Movie Night, and we almost didn't stop laughing from first frame to last - I was highly entertained, in a MST3K type of way.

Jesus Christ - how was this movie made by the same organism that (purportedly) directed Alien and Blade Runner? I'm seriously starting to doubt whether Ridley Scott did actually direct those movies - maybe the DOP, camera operator and script supervisor huddled up and colluded to figure something out (as often happens).

Luckily we decided not to watch it as a drinking game, because otherwise I would now be dead from alcohol poisoning. But had we done so, the times we would have been obliged to down a shot would be:

1/. Spot the crazily mis-proportioned CGI birds, the size of Pterodactyls.

2/. Flapping flags

3/. No idea what's going on with the chronology - day to night to dawn to crepuscule - who can tell what might happen from one shot to the next?

4/. Where is Sigourney Weaver? I think I saw her for three seconds perhaps.

5/. All white lead role actors, all black slaves - hmmm.

6/. Suddenly everything goes blue, with tiny bits of orange flames.

7/. Occasionally contrived lens flares

8/. Anachronistic dialogue - who am I kidding - all of the dialogue was anachronistic

9/. Accents - WTF!

10/. CGI flyover shots with millions of fake extras.

Oh, god, I won't itemise any more because otherwise this review will turn into a Tolstoy novel.

But seriously, I do feel a bit aggrieved about the casting. OK Ben Kingsley is Indian, so that's alright. But Ridley Scott said in the press that he couldn't cast actors of middle eastern/north African heritage because he wouldn't be able to get the funding. Well he SHOULD HAVE PUT HIS FOOT DOWN! It makes it sound like there aren't any middle eastern world class actors.

I have to watch a lot of movies for my job, but this movie, and The Counsellor are possibly two of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life (Australia by Baz Luhrman is the worst).

Not a good job Ridley Scott!

...and so did Jason Blum, Ryan Murphy and all of the cast, crew and production team. This was quite a modest endeavour, but it was executed with style and panache, and IMHO it provided better value for money entertainment than blockbuster projects many times its budget. The casting was excellent - cultish, classy and interesting - and it seemed that the acting department committed to the film 100%. I have to watch a lot of films for my job and consequently I am quite selective about bestowing praise, but there have only been two films I have admired so far in 2014 and they are both Jason Blum productions for whatever that's worth (this one and The Purge: Anarchy).

7.2?!! Are you KIDDING me? I watch a lot of low budget horror films, but I can't remember the last time I saw one so egregiously misjudged. Did no one on the entire production ever stop to consider how the audience might perceive the purported heroine, Kylie? What a horrible bitch. Aren't we supposed to be rooting for the final girl? In this case I found my teeth itching to see her come to a horrifying sticky end at the hands of whoever/whatever because she was unbearable. It takes weeks and weeks to shoot a movie, and weeks and weeks to act a role. Didn't anyone during all that time manage to conceptualise the finished result? This film is absolutely pathetic and an embarrassment to NZ filmmakers, who are usually quite good.

Yet another exercise in all-style-no-substance film-studies-friendly/paying-audience-hostile giallo "homage" from Forzani and Cattet. Oh for Pete's sake - come on guys! Amer was one thing, quite interesting at the time, but the value of that film has somehow been retroactively diminished by the release of its identikit successor. Replicating the surface details of the giallo style is easy peasy - anyone can do it - it's the Spaghetti Bolognese of filmmaking. But the point of the original gialli classics was that they were proper functioning movies that would have worked as exciting thrillers even without the stylistic flash. Neither Amer, nor TSCOYBT, have proper plots, and for me, failure to provide an adequate narrative element is an abdication of the filmmaker's primary responsibility.

I hope, for Forzani and Cattet's sake, that they are not currently working on another EU-cash-lake-for-art-house-piffle funded giallo homage, because they will be risking losing their credibility forever after, which would be a shame, because I get the impression that they are extremely talented and visionary filmmakers.

This film seemed aggressively boring and pretentious, treating the audience as an enemy to be conquered and punished with cruelly contrived tedium.

I wish someone would enact a law to protect former legendary directors (and novelists in this case) from themselves. There were whole fifteen minute sections of this film that contained no plot information whatsoever that could easily have been cut out completely. The six minute pre-title sex scene managed to be boring, vulgar, laughable and embarrassing all at the same time. Who allowed Scott and McCarthy to shoot themselves in the foot so spectacularly in the *opening scene* of their film?

The Counselor reminded me of another alleged "thriller" by a legendary director who shat on his own legacy in his swansong film - Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick. As with that film, I felt like The Counselor had stolen part of my life, and sucked energy out of me, like an evil alien entity.

I managed to get through the first half an hour of the film at regular projection speed before speeding playback up by 50% - but it was still plodding and dreary even then.

Hollywood studios need to start hiring consultants drawn from the general public, who have no fear of career destruction, to tell A list filmmakers the truth about their poor decisions. Someone needs to say "No, James Cameron, don't use Papyrus font to subtitle Na'vi dialogue", "No Steven Spielberg, don't irrevocably ruin your legacy by making one after another worthy-but-dull history lesson films", "No, Ridley Scott, don't use recorder toots as the ignition mechanism of alien spaceships". Who would have thought that out of the whole bunch, it would be George Lucas who bowed out the most graciously and intelligently to leave his magical creations to be shepherded by more contemporary and capable hands?

Alien and Blade Runner are two of my favorite films, and IMHO, two of the greatest films ever made. It's really hard to fathom how they could have been directed by the same person who made such stinkers as A Good Year, Robin Hood, Prometheus and now The Counselor. Bad show Ridley Scott!

I stumbled upon the premiere of this show with English subtitles quite by accident, but I'm so glad I did because now I'm completely hooked. It's mad - it's like Breaking Bad gone completely bonkers.

Sara Maldonado is perfect as the sweet and innocent romantic turned ruthless hellcat, and Erik Hayser is equally engaging as beastly cad Emilio.

As more and more high camp power-hungry monsters are introduced into the story it's getting to be like a crazy and deadly game of chess, with a Shakespearean excess of frenzied plotting and scheming.

I think it's broadcasting until May so if you have a chance to catch up I think it's well worth it. I wish we had more English language shows like this.

I fully admit that I am not in the target demographic for this film, being a man in my 40s, but I'm a film director by profession so I have to watch all significant theatrical release movies.

While viewing the "film" (I suppose that's what you'd call it) all I could really think was "Step aside Jackson Pollock, there's a new king of envelope-pushing abstract art in town!".

What in the hell was going on? I could distinguish that there was one guy who was black (Idris Elba) whose accent fluttered around any and every English speaking country from moment to moment. Then there was a Japanese woman (Rinko Kikuchi) who had some blue bits of hair. But I seriously didn't realize that any of the white guys were different until they happened to be on the screen at the same time.

I absolutely love dense screen compositions, but there's a point where frenzied complexity transitions into white noise, and I felt that point was passed almost all of the time in this film.

It saddens me that Hollywood is squandering so many hundreds of millions of dollars on glorified video game cut-scenes like Pacific Rim when master auteurs like David Lynch and Paul Schrader can't get the funding to shoot a pack shot.

Pathetic!

It kind of annoys me that such a modest, but brilliantly executed, film like this goes STDVD when pretentious piffle like Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby gets sharted over every screen in America.

I got the sense that everyone involved in this movie committed 100% to making an exciting piece of clever and entertaining genre filmmaking. The lighting, production design and music were fantastic and the cast equally superb. Fiona Dourif is an impressive new scream-queen/final-girl and Danielle Bisutti did a wonderful job as the somewhat-sympathetic bitch.

I very much doubt that Don Mancini will be winning a Director's Oscar any time soon, but IMHO he ranks higher than many of the past winners because I feel he believes in value-for-money entertainment - and some of those fancy directors could learn a lesson from him.

I honestly cannot understand why this movie is currently rating so low at IMDb. In my opinion it is one of the most intriguing and original thrillers I have seen in many years.

In some ways it is quite unique in that while at first it seems like a Cronenbergian body horror film, it turns out to be a "horror of the emotions" in which good intentions certainly do lead the well-meaning characters to their own especially cruel versions of hell.

Michael Eklund and Karoline Herfurth were absolutely terrific, diving into their roles with 100% commitment. And Rik Mayall was a revelation in the first serious role I've seen him play.

To me this is an amazing feature debut for writer/director Eron Sheean, most definitely a talent to be watched.

I hope people can overlook the low rating and give this film a chance because I feel it certainly deserves the attention of discerning cinephiles.

Somewhere in this dullfest there was the kernel of a story worth telling, but the opportunity was squandered due to lazy writing and absurd character behavior.

The story structure goes something like this:

1/. Vanessa Hudgens is in danger

2/. Nicolas Cage finds her and gets her to safety

3/. Vanessa Hudgens decides to run away

Repeat steps 1 to 3 every 20 minutes or so.

In fact if it weren't for this structure the film could only have lasted half an hour because there wasn't really any other content in it. The runnings away were so ridiculous (she even managed to run away from Nicolas Cage's own house) that you had to wonder at the capability of the police to do ANYTHING! Surely they could have just booked her for prostitution and kept her safe in police custody until they had time to make a case.

This is the fourth in a row terrible John Cusack movie I have seen (The Raven, The Paperboy, The Factory, The Frozen Ground). What the hell happened? He seems to be turning into the new Michael Madsen. Pretty soon he'll be taking up residence in the 80s movie star retirement home at Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria. Bad show!

I'm so glad I read the review by ClintzFlix before commenting, because while watching I was completely unaware that the writer/star was intentionally portraying himself in an unflattering light.

I'm sure Josh Thomas the person/comedian is absolutely lovely, but the character "Josh" in the show is completely unbearable. The accent, the gait, the sententiousness, the behavior, the entitlement, all made him unsympathetic, and if this were intentional I think it was pushed too far.

The story seemed somewhat implausible, and also a bit self-congratulatory. Gay men are notoriously judgmental about looks, and the idea that a rather homely and effeminate man could have passed as straight for 20 years and found an insanely hot girlfriend, and then upon discovering he's gay almost instantaneously have an insanely hot muscle stud fall in love with him as well is kind of preposterous.

If you're looking for a successful bro-pic watch Patrik 1,5 instead.

Good lord WTF. That's two for two pathetic endeavors of "all style, zero substance" piffle by Joseph Kosinski. I didn't think things could get much worse after Tron 2.0, but here we have another insanely expensive, cruelly unentertaining computer game montage to prove me wrong. Tom Cruise should stick to his former strategy of making films without a female love interest because his attempts at "romance" with women actors are just laughable/vomit-inducing. In our family, watching a Tom Cruise film is inevitably accompanied by the speculation game we call "Who had to suck Tom's cock the most to get into this film?" and clearly the winner here is Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau - although he probably got off lighter than poor Jamie Parker in Valkyrie. I hope Melissa Leo didn't have to film for more than one day - all she was given to do was recite lines in a static close up and mid shot - I bet she's glad she won that Oscar now. What an absolute waste of time and money. Rubbish.

I won't recap the plot, because other reviewers have done it much better than I could. But I do want to express that I feel this was an absolutely brilliant movie by a wonderful and talented newcomer, Nicolas Lopez, with the collaboration of established master Eli Roth.

We'd all like to think (or hope) that everybody will be philanthropic and kind in the face of disaster, but this film shows us the frightening reality of human nature. When you're injured and in pain and terrified you maybe won't meet kind helping hands - you could just as likely meet looters, sadists and rape squads. I've been a traveller my whole life, and I know from personal experience how close the border is between middle-of-the-night drunken fun and horrifying death when you're far from home.

I'm very conservative with my grading at IMDb, but I think this film deserves a rare 10 out of 10.

As a supposed horror/thriller, this movie failed spectacularly in almost every possible parameter of genre film making. Voting seems to have been disabled on this title so I embarked on the viewing with merely the hope (foolish as it now turns out) that it might offer some enjoyable, easily digestible, Friday night frights - but the experience was so entirely devoid of tension, intrigue or wit that I found myself wondering if the filmmakers had ever even seen a horror film before.

This was absolutely the worst type of supernatural horror - the type where the antagonist is either capable, or not capable, of doing whatever the hell is most convenient for the lazy assed writer and director who couldn't be bothered to figure out a proper story or any decent frights. The witch can teleport instantly to or from wheresoever she pleases, making her invulnerable to bullets - although fire extinguisher powder can befuddle her completely apparently, if that's what needs to happen.

Admittedly supernatural horror does require a fair degree of willing suspension of disbelief, and more often than not they inspire eye-rolling instead of terrified shrieks - but I can remember quite a few supernatural horrors of recent years that I was more than happy to go along with for the ride - Sinister, Dead Silence, Insidious to name just a few.

This really was a bad show by the filmmakers, and a disrespectful waste of the viewers' time.

If I were able to vote I'd give this a grudging two out of ten.

I can't remember the last time I was so completely charmed and moved by a film. What an absolute delight, and a wonderful achievement from everyone involved.

I'm very lucky because for my work I get to watch at least one or two films a day, but good lord, most of those films are tedious to watch all the way through even once - so it's very rare to encounter films that can be watched with pleasure over and over again. And I'm not talking about super-duper-once-in-a-lifetime films like Aliens that of course we can watch a million times, but films made on modest budgets by teams who obviously put their hearts and souls into making something beautiful and meaningful with limited resources.

Patrik 1.5 is an unusual romantic comedy in that it's about the love relationship between fathers and sons - a (non-sexual) love story between a man (Goran) who desperately wants a son and a boy (Patrik) who desperately wants a father. It's also a love story between the audience and Goran, played absolutely perfectly by Gustaf Skarsgard - I cannot believe that even the grumpiest conservative could not fall in love with such a beautiful, kind, caring, vulnerable but brave person, and I think it's depictions of regular guy gay characters like this in films that will have more influence in bringing about change for the better than the most strident political hectoring. What the film recognises and depicts so beautifully is that in any father son relationship, the sons, even very young sons, understand that sometimes they have to look after their dads (or father figures) - that's what it means to be a man. Perhaps the reason the film provoked so many tears for me is because it made me realise all the love that my deceased father needed that I was not able to give him.

Director Ella Lemhagen has done a fantastic job organising cast, crew and production staff to build a first rate film on a bargain budget. And of course that would not have been possible without the most crucial raw material, the complex and beautiful script by Michael Druker. The production design is superb, and the music, by Fredrik Emilson, is perfectly judged to enhance and colour the moments of poignancy and desperate unspoken longing.

And Gustaf Skarsgard - what to say? How is he not the most famous and adored of the Skarsgard acting clan? Usually I don't have much respect for actor children of established stars, because you always feel they got a leg-up into an exciting job that we'd all love to do but don't have the chance. But I don't get the impression that Gustaf Skarsgard is an entitled movie brat - I think he really surrendered himself into this role and let down all his defences to give people a beautiful cinematic, and emotionally cathartic, experience - and that's not something that many actors are capable of, or willing, to do, whether they come from acting families or not.

Anyway, for me this is one of those very rare films that scores 10 out of 10.

It's difficult to know how it's possible to go wrong making a film like this, especially considering there is no shortage of existing dot-to-dot templates (e.g. Spellbound) to work from, yet somehow director Rotaru manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. There is nothing egregiously terrible about the film per se, it's just that while watching it one can't help but get caught up in a stream of consciousness fantasy about how it ought to have been so much better. Strange artistic decisions abound - when Drew Mays is shown practicing at home we have to sit through several minutes of children dressed as fairies pirouetting in the foreground; capsule background biographies extend five to ten minutes longer than welcome; an absurd attempt is made to manufacture a heterosexual romance between an obviously closeted gay male performer and some random woman; but apparently no one makes any attempt to protect contestants from themselves and ensure they are dressed in a manner they won't be ashamed to watch on screen in years to come. Of course one could say that a documentarian's responsibility is simply to observe and present, but surely after 15 years of reality TV there's a pretty much universal understanding that story and character are components that are built and enhanced in the edit. There wasn't enough music, and what there was of it wasn't the right music. Weirdly we see two pianists performing Schumann's Toccata at different points in the film, but even more weirdly the exact same passage, not even representative of the piece as a whole, is used on both occasions. All the ingredients were there to make a fantastic, uplifting and energizing film about second chances, determination and the healing power of music, yet upon removal from the oven this soufflé fell flat as a pancake.

IMHO the current score of 3.9 out of 10 is too low for this film. No doubt if one were to compare the production standard to The Dark Knight Rises it probably might seem a bit shabby, but that's not the point. It's my belief that we have to judge films to a certain extent according to what they achieve with the resources available. And this shoestring budget production delivered a fairly solid twist-and-turn psycho-noir that we'd all be drooling over had it been directed by David Lynch.

The script, direction and acting were quite strong. Even within the modest limits of available budget there were moments of poetry, some fancy shots, psychological and philosophical sophistication etc. But, sad to say, the film was let down by two elements usually used to hide narrative deficiencies - the lighting and the production design.

Lighting wise it felt there was never quite a full commitment to either Drive-style contemporary film soleil, or classic-era low key noir - instead the majority of the scenes seemed to have flat and characterless lighting that brought to mind cheap daytime TV. I get it that there probably wasn't much money to play with for the production design, but it doesn't have to be expensive to paint a wall. So many of the motel and apartment sets were beige and camel and white with very little wall adornment - paint those walls plum and purple and crimson and you instantly add some Lynchian richness and menace.

The largely Hitchcockian score by Christopher Farrell was good - I've heard his work in some other films recently and have been impressed by his range and creativity. It's a shame he wasn't given more time or leeway to work on the sound design - because even a base layer of subliminal percussion and white noise would have elevated the mood of the whole piece.

Overall I give this film a solid 7 out of 10, although I'll be submitting a 10 out of 10 vote on the page to try to balance out the unfairly low current score.