6/21/14: When Brothers Attack

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actor-writer, Alex Rennie, Awful Nice, Brett Gelman, brothers, Christopher Meloni, cinema, co-writers, comedies, dead father, estranged family, estranged siblings, feuding brothers, feuding families, film reviews, films, Hari Leigh, home renovations, independent film, independent films, indie comedies, James Pumphrey, Jon Charbineau, Keeley Hazell, lake house, Laura Ramsey, male friendships, Movies, sibling rivalry, The Money Pit, The Odd Couple, Todd Sklar, will, writer-director

For anyone who grew up with a sibling, Charles Dickens’ famous quote from A Tale of Two Cities may be all too accurate: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” While there may be no truer, closer friend than a brother or sister, these are also the people who know how to push our buttons better than anyone in this big, crazy world. An older sibling may prove to be a tyrant, while a younger sibling may have been a constant source of annoyance while we were young. The frustrating thing about families, obviously, is that we rarely (if ever) get to pick ours: that particular lottery was taken care of well before we had any say in the situation. Writer-director-actor Todd Sklar’s sophomore film, Awful Nice (2013), takes a look at a pair of estranged brothers who may just come to realize how invaluable they are to each other…if they can keep from beating the crap out of each other, that is.

Jim (James Pumphrey) and Dave (co-writer Alex Rennie, channeling Charlie Day) are estranged brothers who end up forced back into each other’s lives after their father dies and leaves them a dilapidated lake house in his will. Jim is the marginally more mature/responsible of the two, given that he actually has a wife, kids and full-time job, while Dave is more prone to eating donuts out of trash cans, stealing complimentary breakfasts from motels and living so far off the grid that he kinda seems…well…like a vagrant. Even though Jim and Dave haven’t seen each other in years, they manage to handily pick up their former sibling rivalry as if no time had passed, including all of the stupid challenges and dares from their childhood (the dinner scene that begins with a drinking challenge – water, beer, gravy – before turning into an arm-wrestling match that morphs into a fist-fight is a particular highlight). Jim has no time for Dave’s foolishness, while Dave can’t stand Jim’s condescending, superior attitude: nothing’s changed since they were kids except for the addition of facial hair.

After visiting their father’s lawyer, Jon Charbineau (Law and Order’s Christopher Meloni in an absolutely ridiculous wig and glasses), the brothers receive some money to renovate the house, along with an offer for Charbineau’s “personal” construction team to take over the renovations. Jim is all for the idea, wanting nothing more than to get the hell away from Dave and back to wife Michelle (Hari Leigh), who’s becoming increasingly annoyed over his absence from home, thinking he’s just using this as an excuse to bail on familial responsibilities. Dave, on the other hand, is so positive that he and Jim can renovate the wrecked house (think The Money Pit (1986) with better wiring) that he spurns Charbineau’s offer and jumps in headfirst, as it were. Taking the bait, Jim decides to stay and renovate the house, naively believing this to be a fairly simple task. Poor, poor, stupid Jim…

As Jim and Dave continue to work on the house, more and more things begin to go wrong: Dave’s flighty inability to focus on the task at hand leads to untold complications (he begins the renovation by spending $900 of their money on an arcade game, which doesn’t bode well); Charbineau’s construction crew, led by the quietly sinister Ivan (Brett Gelman) appear to be made up of Russian mobsters and don’t take kindly to Dave’s obnoxious attitude or desire to do the job himself; Jim runs into an ex-girlfriend, Lauren (Laura Ramsay), which complicates his present marital difficulties; and Dave falls for a waitress, Petra (Keeley Hazell), who may or may not be a Russian prostitute. In time, many of these disparate issues will come together in a perfect storm, forcing Jim and Dave to finally fix their hopelessly fractured relationship. Will it be too little, too late or will family always win out in the end?

While there’s absolutely nothing unique, ground-breaking or particularly fresh about Awful Nice, it does have a particularly potent ace up its sleeve: the film is very, very funny. Uproariously so, if I may be so bold. The script is exceptionally sharp and witty, which helps do a lot of the heavy lifting, but let’s give credit where it’s due: Pumphrey and Rennie are absolutely perfect as the feuding brother. Not only are the two actors individually funny (as mentioned, Rennie channels Charlie Day’s spastic insanity to near perfection) but they work beautifully as a comedy team. They actually seem like brothers, which is no mean feat, but they’re a perfectly synced combo, which is even more important. While the dialogue is consistently great, much of the film’s physical comedy is completely sold due to how in-tune the two actors are with each other’s comedic style: it’s the kind of complimentary acting that can be found in the best “buddy” films, such as The Odd Couple (1968) or Crosby and Hope’s “Road to…” pictures. The rest of the cast is just fine (although Meloni is so silly as to be almost trifling) but the film is dominated by its charismatic, dynamic leads.

When Awful Nice is funny, it’s very, very funny: there were moments during the film where I laughed harder than I had in some time (the bit where Dave sets off the airbag in Jim’s car by jumping on the hood is a neo-classic, as is the running gag where Jim constantly bops Dave in the head with an umbrella, to Dave’s growing irritation ). The film is never dumb, however (aside from Meloni’s ridiculous get-up), and just as apt to blindside with a genuinely impactful observation about Jim and Dave’s childhood or their miserable adult relationship as it is to throw in a scene where Dave gets his ass beat by a couple sneering yuppies. It’s this expert melding of the emotional and the silly that really drives the film: it’s never so lightweight that it floats away but this sure as hell ain’t On Golden Pond (1981), either. It’s a pretty perfect mix and one that I wish more modern “dramadies” would get right.

For the most part, Awful Nice is a pretty exceptional, modest little film. Not everything works, mind you, and there are a fair number of plot developments that just don’t go anywhere (in particular, the bit with Jim and his ex-girlfriend amounts to a red herring and the Russian construction crew is woefully under-utilized) but the film hits more than it misses and is genuinely funny, which can’t be stated often enough. I also appreciated the little absurdist elements that popped up here and there, never enough to take focus off the rest of the action but just enough to let you know that Sklar and Rennie have got more on their minds than just churning out a low-budget film. Awful Nice is gut-bustingly funny, full of heart and surprisingly sweet without ever becoming cloying: in other words, it was a pretty great little film and I eagerly await Sklar and Rennie’s next full-length. Let’s just hope that if Meloni’s in that one, he gets to keep the rug and Groucho glasses at home.

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6/1/14 (Part Two): Friends, Zombies, Fellow Men in the Country…

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actor-director, actor-writer, B-movies, backwoods folk, Billy Ray, Buck WIld, chupacabra, cinema, co-writers, Dru Lockwood, dude ranch, dumb films, Edgar Wright, film reviews, films, guys' weekend, horror, horror films, horror movies, horror-comedies, hunting, Isaac Harrison, isolated communities, Jerrod Pistilli, Joe Stevens, Mark Ford, Matthew Albrecht, Meg Cionni, Movies, rednecks, Shaun of the Dead, Tom and Jerry, Tyler Glodt, white trash, writer-director, zombie films, zombie movies, zombies

By this point in world history, plain ol’ “vanilla” zombie films don’t really have much effect anymore. Sure, they may be one of the easiest low-budget productions for fledgling filmmakers to get involved in (Got some friends, a camera and a location? Guess what, Jack: you just got yourself the beginnings of a zombie film!) but that also means that we’ve been drowning in this kind of direct-to-video filler for a good thirty years, at this point. Once the “prosumer” camera revolution occurred, it was even easier for filmmakers to pump out this kind of product and it seems that zombie films have been multiplying like Tribbles within the last decade or so. In order to inject a bit of life into the subgenre, filmmakers have turned to various ways to “spruce” up the ol’ gut-munchers, the most popular of which involves slamming comedy and the zombie film together, chocolate and peanut butter-style, to create an entirely new (well, kind of new) sub-subgenre: the zom-com.

While Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) definitely wasn’t the first zom-com (I’d give that title to Dan O’Bannon’s outrageous 1985 yuk/yuck-fest The Return of the Living Dead), it’s probably (still) the most popular one, as well as the first to take the “zom-com” tag and run with it. In the decade since Simon Pegg and the lads tried to forestall a zombie invasion of the UK, there have been several fistfuls of zom-coms, ranging in quality from “drop-dead hilarious” to “just drop dead, already.” In a fairly glutted field, I’m managed to see several worthy successors to Shaun of the Dead: Fido (2006) was an ingenious melding of zom-coms with candy-colored 1950’s nostalgia, while Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) managed to overcome a terribly generic title with solidly-paced jokes and thrills. And, of course, who could forget Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg trading quips in Zombieland (2009)? Mixing zombie chills with chuckles isn’t the easiest task but, when done well, the results can be lots of fun. Unfortunately, Buck Wild (2013), the newest feature from the team of Tyler Glodt and Matthew Albrecht, isn’t so much a “big, dumb blast” as a “really dumb film,” only slightly less stupid than the head-smackingly awful ’80s Troma film Redneck Zombies (1989).

Buck Wild starts promisingly, if crudely, with a fairly funny segment involving beleaguered father Clyde (Joe Stevens), his perpetually horny daughter, Candy (Meg Cionni) and her stupid boyfriend. After decking the boyfriend with a wrench (humping his daughter in the garden is one thing, stepping all over the flowers is a whole other bucket of manure), Clyde ends up getting attacked by a chupacabra. Yes, a chucacabra, ladies and gentlemen. We that, we seem to be off to the races, establishing a crude, fun and extremely tongue-in-cheek attitude.

Unfortunately, the good will begins to fade as the movie proper begins, mostly because we get saddled with a pretty obnoxious group of protagonists. Our “hero” is Craig (co-writer Matthew Albrecht), one of those perpetually put-upon, straight-arrow types that exists solely to become irritated by various indignities. His “best friend,” Lance (Isaac Harrison) is a ridiculously metrosexual “ladies’ man” who happens to be boinking Craig’s girlfriend, Carla (Amerlia Meyers), unbeknownst to our “hero.” The little group is rounded out by Tom (Dru Lockwood) and Jerry (Jarrod Pistilli), who seem to serve as a perpetually at-odds odd couple: you know, cuz they’re named Tom and Jerry? Like the cartoons? The ones with the mouse and cat? Yeah, it just ain’t funny no matter how you slice it, is it? Tom is the typical mealy-mouthed, glasses-wearing dork: we’ve seen at least a million iterations of this character in just the last couple years, nevermind the last couple decades. Jerry, however, is the real prize in this Cracker Jack box: bedecked in a ridiculous fedora, given to smoking cigars in small cars and practicing his nunchuks in the nude, Jerry is supposed to be the epitome of the batshit crazy outsider, that one guy who just…does not…give a FUCK, bro! Except he’s a colossal weenie, sort of a gene-splice between Crispin Glover and Bobcat Goldthwait’s award-winning performance in the Police Academy movies. As such, not only is it impossible to buy the scene where he puts the cigar out on his own hand (cuz this guy totally looks like he would start bawling) but it’s almost offensive to believe that this nitwit occupies the “badass” role in the film. When your bar is that low, no good can come of it, mark my words.

The plot, such as it is, involves one of those “guys-only weekends,” this one ostensibly set-up to allow for not only some male bonding but some animal-shooting, as well. The “gang” heads to the Buck Wild Ranch (Hey! That’s the name of the film! Clever!), which just happens to be run by Clyde. Clyde’s not looking too good and if you’ve seen any zombie films besides this one, you’ll know why. Besides being infected by a chupacabra, Clyde’s also kind of a dick: he calls the guys “punks” and “pissants” (put up your dukes!) and tells them to make sure to stay within the borders of the ranch. Turns out that Clyde’s next-door neighbor is a self-proclaimed “badass” named Billy Ray (Mark Ford) and he doesn’t take kindly to trespassers. The guys end up running afoul of Billy Ray (an absolutely, astoundingly terrible creation that seems to be part frat-boy, part John Waters, part lame-ass rockabilly clothes horse and completely, totally unbelievable) and a completely awful park ranger, Officer Shipley (director/co-writer Tyler Glodt), which don’t really expand the narrative so much as pad it out. Ultimately, they also run afoul of zombies: turns out Clyde has been infecting other locals and, soon, our city slickers are up to their haircuts in the redneck dead. Revelations are had, truths are learned, friends turn into the walking dead, Jerry acts like a badass, yadda yadda yadda. If the ultimate destination of this one-legged mule isn’t readily apparent by the end of the first act…I’m guessing you might actually enjoy this. Hmm…

Look, I’m not gonna sugarcoat this at all: Buck Wild is a stupid film. Aggressively stupid. Worse yet, it’s a hyperactive, self-aware, tone-deaf kind of stupidity that reminds me more of films like Scary Movie (2000) than Shaun of the Dead. Let me give you a good example of the “humor” on display here. After Officer Shipley pulls the guys over because he’s heard “enough gunshots for Baghdad,” he proceeds to stand outside his car and give them a speech about how if you smell shit, you’re probably standing in it. Officer Shipley, it turns out, smells shit: guess what, he asks them. You’re standing in shit, the others point out. And he is…he really is standing in a big pile of shit. Now, if anything about that was humorous (keep in mind that the “delivery” of said “joke” doesn’t help things), Buck Wild just may be right up your alley. Lest we think that the writers only have one kind of joke up their sleeve, they also show us how hilarious and timely their references are: Tom ends up a captive at Billy Ray’s compound and Jerry goes to save him, in a scene that features an ultra-sleazy brass song, Tom bent over a table wearing only his underwear and Jerry wielding a samurai sword. Yeah, that’s right: it’s a fucking Pulp Fiction reference. Not only that, but it’s a “humorous” reference to the rape scene: now that’s comedy!

Lest it sound like Buck Wild is completely worthless, there are actually three elements of the film that really work. The first element is the cinematography, which is consistently well-done and clear: in low-budget films like this, you’re usually lucky if you get something that looks half-way decent, let alone good. The second element that works (spectacularly well, I might add) are the fake TV shows that we occasionally see. One of them, a public access show called “Fucking Hunting” that features Billy Ray and his motley crew, is an absolute scream, miles away the funniest thing in the film. Hot on its heels, however, is another gem of a fake show, this one called “Living Through the Gray,” a self-help show about dealing with color-blindness. The TV shows are not only the funniest moments in the film, hands down, but they’re actually two of the funniest moments I’ve seen in any film recently: it’s a shame that they’re left to die amid the humorless wasteland that is the rest of the film.

The third element that actually works in Buck Wild is an extremely smart and subversive little commentary on the casual female nudity that inundates most low-mid budget horror films. Unlike similar films that might feature a terrified young starlet running around topless, Buck Wild chooses to make Tom the object of the “male gaze.” For the majority of the film, due to one incident or another, Tom rarely wears more than his underwear and socks: at one point, he fashions a toga out of a garbage bag, only to have a zombie rip it to shreds. Later, he gets to take a shower and emerges, clad in a bathrobe, only to have a passing zombie yank it off, exposing him once again. I’ll be honest: this particular running gag never got old and displayed the kind of invention and thought that I wish the rest of the film possessed. I don’t actually recall any female nudity at all, to be honest, although we get plenty of Tom. In some ways, this seems to be a callback to the Pee Wee character in Porkys (1982), who likewise spends the majority of that film in a constant state of embarrassment, harassment and undress. While the film often seems to be exceptionally mean to Tom, it ends up paying off big dividends, especially during a nicely emotional final setpiece.

Ultimately, however, a few worthy elements don’t a worthy film make. If Buck Wild were just a little less inane and stupid, it would be mighty easy to recommend it as the kind of low-budget romp that it thinks it is. Unfortunately, the film mostly ends up being a showcase of missed opportunities and foul balls, with nary a true home run in the batch (unless we count the TV shows, which really only amount to 2-3 minutes of screen-time, max). While I’m more than willing to give Glodt and Albrecht another chance, there’s no way I would put these guys on my radar: Fool me once, fool me twice and all that jazz.

5/20/14: Holidays in Cambodia

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actor-writer, Antony Starr, Cambodia, cinema, drama, drug smuggling, feature-film debut, Felicity Price, film reviews, films, husband-wife team, indie dramas, infidelity, Joel Edgerton, Kieran Darcy-Smith, Movies, relationships on the rocks, Teresa Palmer, vacations from hell, vanished into thin air, Wish You Were Here, writer-director

There can be very few pains as acute as not knowing what has happened to a missing person, especially a loved one. When someone has died, there is, if nothing else, the opportunity to arrive at closure. When someone is missing, however, there is no such opportunity: any sighting could be a lead…any missed call could be a plea for help…any half-seen face, a glimpse of familiar clothing, might mean something. There’s always the hope that the person might, one day, just walk back into the room: while there’s (not usually) this hope for the dead, the missing could always come back. Possibly. Perhaps. The indie drama Wish You Were Here (2012) deals with the pain and fear that accompanies just such a disappearance and how the resulting actions can stir some very dark waters.

The film begins, in happier times, with two couples jaunting around south Cambodia in one of those sequences that looks alarmingly like a credit card commercial: husband and wife, Dave (Joel Edgerton) and Alice Flannery (co-scripter Felicity Price), are expecting child number three and want one more chance to let their hair down, while Alice’s sister, Steph (Teresa Palmer), has just met a dreamy new guy, Jeremy (Antony Starr), who wants to treat her (and Alice and Dave, by extension) to an all-expenses-paid vacation in southeast Asia. They seem to be having a blast, sampling the local cuisine, swimming, dancing, visiting beautiful temples and smoke-filled dance clubs. It’s a really kinetic, fun sequence that ends with a shell-shocked Dave stumbling around, on his own, in a desolate countryside. Something has happened, it would seem…something very bad.

We find out that Dave and Alice are now back home in Sydney, while Steph has stayed behind to try to figure out what happened to Jeremy, who’s been missing for nine days, at that point. Both Dave and Alice seem concerned, as befits the situation, but life must go on and they have their hands a bit full. When Steph is unexpectedly ejected from Cambodia for making a nuisance of herself, she returns to Dave and Alice, setting off a chain-reaction of unpleasant revelations, not the least of which is that she and Dave had themselves a little sex on the beach on the night that Jeremy disappeared. As this revelation tears apart Alice, Dave and their two small children, darker revelations begin to seep to the surface: does Dave know more about Jeremy’s disappearance than he’s letting on? Why are the local police so interested in Jeremy’s import/export business? And where, exactly, did Dave go on the night that Jeremy vanished?

For the most part, Wish You Were Here is a suspenseful, involving feature-film debut from Australian actor Kieran Darcy-Smith, co-scripted with his wife, actress Felicity Price. Darcy-Smith is known for brutal crime films like The Square (2008) and Animal Kingdom (2010) and there’s definitely a lot of that grit found in his directorial debut, although the meat of the story is still focused around Dave’s infidelity and the impact it has on the family. To be honest, however, I actually felt this split focus to be a bit of a problem: the missing-person storyline, which technically provides the base of the film, is a much more interesting story than the rather tired infidelity angle. I do understand the need to add weight and emotional heft to the film but the cheating aspect quickly subsumed the mystery angle, to the discredit of both. On the one hand, not enough attention gets paid to the idea of Jeremy being missing in a foreign country, under mysterious circumstances, while undue attention is paid to the back-and-forth between Alice and Dave over his affair with Steph. It’s not spoiling anything to say that the two aspects of the film don’t actually have anything to with each other, unless on a purely coincidental level: removing one aspect or the other wouldn’t have radically changed the opposing storyline, even if it would have made for a much different film.

The acting, especially from Edgerton and Price, is outstanding across the board, although I really wish that Antony Starr would have been utilized more. I’ve been a big fan of Starr since his work on the Australian TV series Outrageous Fortune and was looking forward to seeing him on the big screen. Alas, his role amounts to scarcely more than a cameo: playing the missing guy in a movie about a missing guy generally means that you spend large chunks of time off-camera…unless you’re Tom Hanks, that is. Starr isn’t Hanks but he does bring a breezy, easy-going quality to Jeremy that also leaves room for a little ambivalence: how “nice” of a nice guy is Jeremy, really? Teresa Palmer, as Steph, is the only potential buzzkill in the cast: she vacillates between shrill and wheedling, which assures that her character is almost never sympathetic. Most of the time, you just want to tell her to get on with it, already, which plays as much into Palmer’s performance as to the character.

Darcy-Smith ends up with a pretty good look for the film, although his cinematographer overuses certain filters and visual effects, a tendency which occasionally makes it difficult to differentiate between the films numerous flashbacks and the “present day.” These flashbacks become a bit of a problem as the film progresses: often, it’s difficult to tell what timeframe we’re in and there was one specific instance where I thought Dave had flown back to Cambodia on his own (which would have confused the hell out of me) only to find out later that this was more footage from the night Jeremy died. This seemed needlessly confusing, especially since the film wasn’t trying to tell a particularly tricky story: it just seemed like an overly clunky way to do it, that’s all.

Wish You Were Here isn’t an amazing film and it’s definitely not an original film but it is a consistently well-done and absorbing film. There is some genuine tension to the mystery and I’ll be honest: I didn’t guess the “truth,” which made me pretty happy. The resolution is no “Sixth Sense”-esque mind-bender but it is a fairly nifty revelation and repaints many previous scenes with a new air of menace. All in all, the film is a decent drama about a fractured couple working to rebuild their marriage while looking for their missing friend. If it could have been a much better film as an all-in mystery about looking for Jeremy (something along the lines of Midnight Express (1978) from the outside, perhaps), that’s a bit of a shame.

4/1/14: Lesser Than Zero

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actor-writer, Adam Sandler, Amy Brenneman, bad films, bad movies, bookies, channeling Adam Sandler, cinema, cops, Dayton Callie, Detective Iggy, drama, Elizabeth Perkins, film reviews, films, gangsters, George DiCenzo, J.B. Smoove, Jersey Shore, Jimmy Smits, John Spencer, John Turturro, Lesser Prophets, Michael Badalucco, Movies, Paul Diomede, Robert Miano, Scott Glenn, Steve Harris, stupid films, suicidal brothers, tedious, terrible films, The Practice, William DeVizia

As someone who watches a lot of films, I certainly watch my fair share of flops. As someone who patently refuses to turn off even the worst film, however, I also suffer through a lot of bad films. In most cases, these films end up being merely colossal wastes of time (which, by itself, certainly isn’t a good thing). Sometimes, however, films can be so aggressively terrible, so massively flawed in every conceivable way, that it’s almost as if the universe is issuing me a personal challenge: make it through this…if you dare! In roughly 98% of these instances, I’ve emerged victorious, if hopelessly scarred from the battle. Every great once in a while, however, a film comes along that completely breaks me, wearing me down to the point where continuing would be futile torture and the only sane response would be to throw the damned thing into the nearest trashcan. The Last Rites of Ransom Pride was the closest that a terrible film has come to making me throw in the towel in quite some time. Lesser Prophets, however, ended up being a film so tone-deaf, so wholesale awful, that I almost gave up. Key word, of course, being “almost”: if Last Rites couldn’t reduce me to mindless jelly, there was no way in hell I was going to let this monstrosity beat me. That, after all, is how the bad guys win. And I am not about to let Lesser Prophets win.

There are a lot of ways to make a bad film but one of the surest, most obnoxious ways is to take a simple story and make it needlessly complicated with excess characters, pointless activity and endless red herrings. If you really want to knock one out of the park, throw in a bad script, especially if it features some of the most bone-headed dialogue in recent memory and give us some actors who are in an active competition to see who can emote the hardest. The cherry on top? This one is only for professionals but is guaranteed to make your production nigh impossible to watch: make sure that the tone of the film is constantly at odds with its individual scenes. Need an example? Replace the classic Friday the 13th score with music from My Little Pony but keep everything else the same. Still foggy? How about adding fart noises and a xylophone to a torture scene? Need a better example? Sit through any 10-minute portion of Lesser Prophets and consider yourself enlightened.

Since this is (technically) a review, I suppose that I should at least attempt to summarize the plot. To the best of my limited abilities, here goes: Detective Iggy (Scott Glenn) is trying to bust three bookies, Jerry (George DiCenzo), Charlie (Michael Badalucco) and Eddie (John Spencer). Iggy’s brother, Sal (Robert Miano) owed money to the bookies and killed himself when he couldn’t pay up, leading Iggy on a quest for revenge (kind of/sort of). The bookies “tolerate” local guy Leon (John Turturro), who appears to be just a few cards short of a full deck. Leon keeps an eye on his neighbor (Elizabeth Perkins) and her son, who are being resoundly thrashed by husband/father Bernie (Dayton Callie), a slimy art thief. Mike (Jimmy Smits) is a smug neighborhood asshole who owes lots of money to the bookies but refuses to pay, since he’s decided to move away (ask the Federal government how well that works). He and his racist friend (who appears to be the prototype for most male characters on the Jersey Shore) end up running afoul of a black gang leader, played by The Practice’s Steve Harris, and who gets the single most descriptive name in the entire film: Giant black man who throws brick…I shit you not. Somehow, all of these disparate “characters” (I use the quotes since none are actually fully developed enough to be considered characters, merely lazy symbols) come together in a tsunami of absolute suckage, leading to a finale that is as outrageously cheerful as the rest of the film is cheerfully terrible (Spoiler alert: everybody who’s still alive gets a happy ending, regardless of what awful acts they committed in the film…call it a reward for making it to the finish line, I guess). Cut to credits.

There are, as briefly stated above, about a million reasons to dislike Lesser Prophets. In the interest of space, I’ll list just a few of the nearly limitless group:

— The acting ranges from “just there” to “bizarre” to “dinner theater”

— John Turturro channels the bone-headed-jerk era of Adam Sandler so eerily that it must be on purpose

— Wipe-cut transitions and “zany” music seem a bit goofy when used between suicides and gangster scenes

— There were about seven main characters too many: at times, this seemed to have one of DeMille’s casts of thousands, even though it looked like a Poverty Row direct-to-video release

— Scott Glenn is an amazing actor and seeing him ham it up in this hurts my heart

— The film tries way too hard to be both cool and funny but it is neither

Ultimately, Lesser Prophets is a terrible film, devoid of even the unabashed craptasticality that can save similarly terrible films like Megalodon 3 or The Room. Tellingly, Lesser Prophets’ writer, Paul Diomede, is also one of its “actors”: he makes an appearance as someone named Cheddar Fry. Full disclosure: I don’t remember anyone named Cheddar Fry. Perhaps he was Jimmy Smits’ racist friend…perhaps he was one of Steven Harris’ “tough” gang members. He might have been playing Leon’s bicycle, for all I know. I will tell you one thing, however: I ain’t watching the movie again to find out.