A trio of criminals – Stephen Dorff as the sensible one, Emile Hirsch in a risible performance as the kill-hungry psycho and some guy whose name I’m too lazy to look up as the soon to be dead one – and a hostage (Gigi Zumbado), fleeing the results of their bloody assault on a mafia-run pawnshop, end up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Sensible One and Psycho would be bound to murder one another sooner or later, but the dark and unintentionally funny secret below the farm is going to make that rather unnecessary.
Even working with little money, Ryuhei Kitamura only seldom can resist being a show-off, still loving tacky editing tricks and crap practical effects to bits. I would like him, and probably more of his movies, for this, but most of them end up lacking the sort of charm or aesthetic individuality that would make them work for me as the kind of cool exploitation fare they are so clearly supposed to be. To my eyes, most of his films are nearly totally lacking in this regard, as well as in decent scripts, with a couple of exceptions where I always assume somebody behind the scenes managed to channel Kitamura’s bad taste in the right directions to present his actual talents as a filmmaker.
This is not one of those movies, but rather an increasingly stupid mix of would-be post-Tarantino crime movie, torture porn, and a lot of annoyingly edited gore, mostly taking place in ugly, fake looking sets and of course a patch of desert. Dorff and Zumbado do their best with what they are given, but since the script by Kitamura and Christopher Jolley shows little idea of how to work clichés productively, and Hirsch is actively working against them, they are pretty much left alone.
Which leaves a couple of decent gore gags I’d probably have more patience for in a film made by someone working out of their family garage. So, hardly a movie at all.
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