Sweet 16 (1983)

MAY 30, 2018

GENRE: SLASHER, THRILLER
SOURCE: STREAMING (AMAZON PRIME)

I remember reading somewhere along the line that Sweet 16 was not really a slasher film, and just sort of in the vicinity of one, lumped in more for its cast (Friday the 13th Part 3's Dana Kimmell stars, and a few years later co-star Don Shanks would play Michael Myers, which didn't help the somewhat erroneous association) than its body count or vibe. So I kind of wanted to see it out of curiosity, but never put much effort into it - I sure as hell wasn't gonna blind buy it or anything like that. But it's on Amazon Prime now, and I pay like 100 bucks a year for the damn service and rarely use it outside of the "free" shipping (I gotta check to see if I'm getting $100 worth of free shipping every year...), so I figured I'd finally see what all the non-fuss was about.

Ironically, I found it more slasher-y than expected! Sure, it doesn't quite fit the mold of the era, but it's got a body count of I think five (Halloween's count!), a whodunit approach, and even a dumb sequel setup ending. But it's also missing a number of the key ingredients, particularly a proper Final Girl; Kimmell's character spends most of her screentime trying to take after her sheriff father (Bo Hopkins) and solve the case, only to sit out the entire climax while Hopkins solves the mystery himself. And since the killer is only targeting dudes that hit on the other main girl, Melissa (she's the one turning sixteen, with the climax being at her eponymous birthday party), she's also never on the killer's radar. That along with the lack of any chases keeps it from full on slasher territory, in my opinion, but I wouldn't throw a fit if it was in between Splatter University and Terror Train on someone's shelf.

Actually, what it REALLY feels like is a giallo more than anything else, albeit without the style. With the POV kill scenes (as opposed to a masked/costumed killer one could see and say "Oh, the Sweet 16 killer!") and occasionally icky moments, I found myself thinking about those films than Happy Birthday to Me or whatever. For starters, like most gialli it's impossible to discern the motive until someone shows up at the end and tells us about some buried secret, unlike a slasher where even if you don't know who the killer is you know what their deal is (i.e. My Bloody Valentine - whoever the Miner is, he doesn't like people celebrating Valentine's Day). And then when we do hear the motive it sounds very much like any number of Italian films, with the killer trying to work through some childhood trauma by offing everyone that reminds them of someone in their past, in this case their father. In fact, I recently watched an actual giallo called Eye in the Labyrinth that more or less had that same idea, oddly enough. In place of those older films' rampant misogyny we get some racial discomfort, with people suspecting a local Native American man (Shanks) as the killer simply because he's an Indian, and the local good ol' boys have some choice attitudes towards him even before the murders start. So if you ever wanted to see what a Texan giallo was like, you should check this out.

Anyway I kind of enjoyed it. The mystery is pretty good; I didn't peg the killer until it was revealed, which is always a plus (as long as it's not a cheat, that is) and again it had a couple more kills than I was expecting, changing the suspect pool. It's a shame that Kimmell's character didn't do more of the sleuthing, however, especially in the back half where it becomes pretty clear that Hopkins couldn't possibly be the killer, canceling out a perfectly good suspect and a potentially interesting plot point. If her dad WAS the killer, she'd have to choose between her only parent (the mom is deceased) and some strangers, which would have been interesting to see play out. Then again, I don't think she's the best actress in the world so perhaps it's better in the long run for the movie to not give her too much of the movie's heavy lifting. Plus it's funny to watch Hopkins going through microfiche as he solves the mystery, while the lab tech who is in love with him practically throws herself at him non-stop even though he barely seems to notice.

As for Melissa, it's odd - the plot revolves around her, but she's kind of a secondary character. She's introduced as a sort of vixen/troublemaker, i.e. the kind of girl who might end up getting killed early on (think Laura Palmer), but then she softens a bit after people start dying, for reasons that don't have much of a payoff. The thing is, she never really has any scenes to herself besides a shower scene that's inserted for no real reason (and is a bit of an eyebrow raiser since the character is only 15 - the actress was 20 in real life, but still), so it's kind of hard to get a real grasp on her or even see her as the major character the plot insists she is. We spend more time watching Hopkins be a cop than anything else; hell I think Michael Pataki as the town's mayor might even have more screentime, even though he ultimately doesn't have anything to do with the narrative. Sure, we need red herrings in a movie like this, but when they come at the expense of developing a primary character, it's not the best maneuver.

Ultimately it's the kind of movie I'm glad I didn't see until I was an adult; had I rented it when I first heard about it at age 13 or so, I probably would have been bored/disappointed with the lack of kills. But now that I am more familiar with gialli and also simply more patient, I could mostly get on board with its low-key approach to the material. It's got a great mix of young faces and character actors (in addition to Hopkins and Pataki, you got Susan Strasberg and Patrick Macnee as Melissa's parents) and just enough action to keep it from being the "Lifetime Thriller" type film it often resembles. Like the other day's Girls Nite Out, it's a "slasher completionists only" kinda deal, but for different reasons. Basically: it's fine.

What say you?

P.S. If you don't have Amazon Prime, you can also see the movie on Pluto TV, a free service that mimics a cable lineup. Only downside is that their ad breaks are inserted at random, sometimes mid-sentence, so it can be an off-putting viewing experience (not to mention annoying since the ads repeat a lot). But hey, it's free, so you get what you pay for.

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Girl's Nite Out (1982)

MAY 25, 2018

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: STREAMING (YOUTUBE)

As slasher plots go, setting a killer loose on a group of college kids engaged in an all night scavenger hunt is a pretty solid one, and as slasher costumes go, putting your murderer in a goofy bear mascot outfit (complete with googly eyes) is pretty much the dumbest idea. Girl's Nite Out (aka The Scaremaker) does both, which alone would make it if nothing else one of the weirder entries in the slasher canon's golden era, but the movie goes a step further with a third act that defies any conventional wisdom about body count flicks, elevating a quirky but ultimately forgettable slasher into "You have to see this goddamn thing" territory for slasher aficionados. Everyone else should probably steer clear, though.

Despite the promising setup, for an hour or so the movie is just another weak slasher from the twilight of the slasher boom. The pacing is particularly damaging; the scavenger game doesn't even start for over forty minutes, forcing you to endure an endless party scene, a basketball game, the Final Girl's boyfriend Teddy's endless wooing of another woman before things finally get slashy. To be fair there are a couple of quick kills to tide us over until that point, but the first is of a gravedigger and seems like it was possibly added later to get another kill in, and the second is actually kind of a dumb move, as it's of Benson, the guy who usually wears the mascot costume. Why they'd cancel out a good red herring in a whodunit is beyond me; my only guess is that they were going for a "show the bomb under the table" vibe for all the subsequent scenes where someone sees the killer and thinks it's Benson, but for the most part he attacks almost as soon as they see him, and he never once uses his "in" to get someone alone (think Terror Train when he takes out Mitchy). As much as the movie needed some action in its first half, I would have rather they sprung his death as a surprise on us later.

Then again it's not particularly difficult to figure out who the killer is, since the performer is someone you'll probably recognize and they only appear in a couple of inconsequential early scenes, so as soon as you think "Hey where's ____? Why would they hire them to play that random?" you'll instantly realize you know exactly why - so they can turn up later as the killer (I've referred to this as "Orser's Rule", after actor Leland Orser, who showed up as an anonymous technician in Bone Collector, a rule otherwise beneath him at that point, making the film's mystery a complete non-starter). I won't spoil their identity for those who might not recognize the actor or actress, but I have more to say about the film's climax, so skip the next paragraph if you want to be as charmingly confused as I was.

So once the killing gets started, the movie becomes a pretty normal slasher (save for the goofy costume), as the murderer offs all of the girls playing the game while leaving the men alone (not that many of them seem to be playing anyway). The killer's weapon is cool at least - a homemade "bear claw" made out of knives taped together in between the fingers (so, basically a cheap version of Freddy's glove, but keep in mind this film predated Wes Craven's by two years), and there's some decent stalk and slash action in this 20-30 minute chunk of the film, if not quite enough to make up for its interminable first half. But then things go a bit haywire once our heroine Lynn (Julia Montgomery) finds the body of one of her friends and calls the cops... because they actually show up! And then we watch them interrogate the male characters for ten minutes, at a point in the film where we should be watching our killer chase her around for a while before she unmasks them and they explain themselves before chasing her again. The game is called off, and everyone goes home while we watch people get questioned and ruled out.

And it gets weirder, as Lynn goes home and we suddenly switch focus to Dawn, the girl Teddy cheated on her with. After Dawn's own boyfriend throws her out for her cheating ways, she realizes the killer is watching her and she runs to the nearest phone to call Teddy, who is trying to comfort Lynn, still upset about the whole "finding the dead friend" thing (I don't think she knows about the cheating). Teddy races off to help her, only to find her attacked/dying already, and then the unmasked killer steps out unceremoniously and stabs him, just as the head of campus security (Hal Holbrook!) shows up and calmly explains that he knows they're the killer. The killer rambles a bit, reveals another corpse behind them, and... it goes to credits. Teddy and Dawn's fates are left unresolved, Holbrook never makes any attempt to arrest/subdue the killer, and our would-be heroine Lynn is left out of the climax entirely. I was so delighted by the rule breaking that I now kind of love the movie despite being bored through more than half of it.

I wish I knew for sure that this unusual approach to a slasher movie's final reel was intentional, a way to throw the audience off after they've gotten so accustomed to how these things work after the past couple years. But sadly, I suspect the wonkiness was just the result of the film's unfortunate production schedule, in which the cast and crew allegedly had to shoot most of the movie over a weekend as they were using an active college campus and couldn't be disrupting normal activity. So it's possible that they didn't get to shoot everything and had to make do with what they had, even if it meant not having an actual ending for their movie. This would also explain the lethargic pace and endless scenes of little importance - they probably didn't have much, if anything, to cut to in order to pare down scenes (many of which are indeed single takes of two people talking), and if they cut these flab scenes entirely the film wouldn't be long enough to get released. And they probably wanted to use every bit of footage they had of Holbrook, who spends all but one of his scenes alone in his shots as they probably only had him for a few hours. Whenever he interacts with another character, there's nothing to establish them both in a single shot or even a body double to show how far apart they are or anything like that, resulting in more than one awkwardly staged conversation (the first time we see him is particularly clunky, as he seems spliced in from another movie entirely).

Now, all of this stuff will be amusing to slasher fans who are used to the basic template, but if you're a casual horror fan with no specific affinity for the sub-genre, you'll probably just see this as a stiff, bad movie. So I want to be clear that I only really recommend it to the people who live and breath these things, who can identify which movie a Jason mask is from based on its markings and things like that. In fact, Friday fans in particular will appreciate the movie more than the average bear, as Part 2's Lauren-Marie Taylor (of "The one with the puck" fame) appears as one of the non-Final Girls (who is apparently having an affair with her second cousin), and her death scene is one of the film's most memorable. As for me, I'm hellbent on seeing every slasher movie ever made, and I only just heard about the movie this week, so I hope my quest continues to uncover these oddities and make it all worthwhile. My usual stance is that if you've never heard of a movie in a genre you're particularly interested in there's probably a good reason - I hope I am proven wrong again (and again) in the future.

What say you?

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Bad Samaritan (2018)

MAY 4, 2018

GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

As the credits rolled on Bad Samaritan, one of the four other people in the theater - the only one who didn't bolt as soon as the credits began - turned to me and said "Well that wasn't very good, was it?" I agree with her, but even if I didn't, I'd be tickled by the encounter, as it's very rare that a stranger will offer their opinion to me in the middle of a theater (or anywhere, for that matter), but then again it's very rare you can see such a nothing movie like this on the big screen. How it escaped the VOD hell it deserved to get a 2,000 screen release is beyond me, but in a way it's kind of charming to see a movie with almost no stars, a bare minimum of action, and a generic plot playing in an auditorium adjacent to the newest Avengers (which I could occasionally hear through the walls, as daring me to switch theaters).

The plot is sort of combined from Marcus Dunstan's films The Neighbor and The Collector. Our protagonist goes into a house intending to rob it (Collector) and finds a woman chained up (Neighbor), because it turns out the owner (David Tennant) wasn't just some rich douchebag, but he's also a psycho. However he is unable to free her (she's chained up, the chains bolted to the floor) so he runs out and calls the cops, but unfortunately - as is often the case - the bad guy cleans up all of the evidence by the time the cops get there to investigate. That's not the worst idea for a movie by any means - it's always fun to see a criminal go up against a bigger criminal, torn between covering his own ass and doing the right thing - but director/producer Dean Devlin and screenwriter Brandon Boyce do that thing where they seemingly WANT to make every wrong choice possible over the course of their film, keeping it from ever being as thrilling or even as stupidly trashy as it could be. Instead, it's just a giant slog; it takes nearly an hour for Tennant to target our thieving "hero" (Robert Sheehan) and start making his life a mess, and then another 30 minutes for Sheehan to finally start fighting back.

But even if they arrived at this in half the time, it'd still be a misfire, since Tennant's got a weird escalation for his villainy. In a span of less than ten minutes he hacks into Sheehan's Facebook account and dumps his girlfriend via wall post ("It's over, bitch" - LOL), then gets his parents fired from their jobs (OK, not funny, but still rather benign), then... he appears out of nowhere, repeatedly slamming the girlfriend's head into a wall before throwing her over a railing and leaving her for dead. It's the most violent act we see in the film, against a character who was already kind of written out, so it's unjustified on a narrative level and just plain bad on a tonal one. His MO is to "break" people the way one breaks a horse (and yes, this is an actual line in the movie; one of two times I laughed out loud at how dumb something was), but when most of what he's doing is ruining other people's lives I'm not sure how it's supposed to break Sheehan - it just fires him up to get back at him, since he's not really doing much to him directly. Tennant busts up the kid's shitty old Volkswagen, but it never has any effect on his ability to get around - and later he inexplicably leaves his Maserati just sitting there for the kid to take anyway!

Tennant, by the way, is the only reason to watch the movie. The horse breaking stuff is ridiculous enough to amuse, and he seems to be enjoying playing a douchey psycho, screaming like Nic Cage in a few scenes and donning phony accents in others when he has to set Sheehan up for this or that go nowhere subplot. For example he poses as a neighbor to report a break-in when he knows Sheehan and his partner in thieving are going back into the house to try to rescue the girl (or at least find some proof that she was/is there), but they run away before being caught. Worse, when a detective stops by later, he sees the window they used to break in and treats it as if it's some unusual thing - and weirder still, Tennant lies and says he broke the window himself? Why? The cops were already there for the break-in, i.e. it's on the record, so why is he covering it up? And why didn't the detective put that together in the first place? I guess it doesn't matter, because despite being established as the doubting authority figure who will eventually become our hero's ally (and possibly killed), the detective just walks out of that scene and the movie as a whole, never mentioned again. Every single scene with him could have been deleted and it'd have no bearing on the plot.

It would improve the runtime, however. If this thing was like 80 minutes it MIGHT qualify as "silly dumb timekiller" material, but if you got two hours to kill you should be watching something legitimately good, or playing a game, reading a book, etc. The last 15 minutes or so are delightfully stupid at times, and there's a legitimately great line courtesy of Kerry Condon (the trapped girl), but it takes too damn long to get there, with almost nothing even remotely as amusing to tide us over until that point. Tennant blows up his own house for no discernible reason (Devlin must be trying to work Emmerich out of his system), but other than that there's no real action or anything, just a few scattered moments of out of nowhere violence. It's so hard to find payoffs too; Tennant puts a tracker on the kid's car, but only uses it once before just destroying the car anyway. We get a followup scene with a family they robbed prior to Tennant (they run a valet service at a restaurant; if someone lives close enough they take the car back to the person's home, access it, grab some stuff that won't be noticed right away, and return the car before the owners finish eating), suggesting that these people might keep coming back to haunt them in some way, but nah (I later learned the actress playing the mom in the family is Devlin's wife, so I guess he just wanted to give her another scene even if it had no purpose). It's almost like the editor worked backwards, taking what could have been an OK-ish movie and adding things back in until it was just a messy chore.

I'm also baffled that it's being pushed as a horror film (I went in fully expecting a thriller, for the record - its horror-free state had no bearing on my disliking of the film), as it even skirts over most of the thriller elements. Tennant is said to have done this before, and we see a corpse in a pit, but otherwise his more sadistic/serial killer-y actions are left not just offscreen but unused at all. We see a torture room of sorts in his garage, but it's never used and he even takes it all down before the cops show up, so it doesn't even function as a possible destination for one of our heroes. Condon's character has a few injuries but it's never shown how she got them - she's already been kidnapped when the film begins and we spend so much time on Sheehan and Tennant that she is left on the sidelines for large chunks of it, another thing the movie botches since the climax is about her rescue and yet I still wasn't entirely sure of her name. The R rating is pretty much just for language and an isolated shot of a breast; the few acts of on-screen violence are brief. Hell they don't even have any good cat and mouse stuff between the two leads - except for a brief scene where Tennant enters Sheehan's home while he's showering, the two are never in the same space until the final few minutes. There's rarely a reason to even get tense, let alone scared, and the marketing folks are doing no favors trying to sell it to the genre crowd.

They do get one thing right, however: use of technology. Sheehan scores a major victory at one point, getting a shot of Tennant in the act because his friend accidentally pressed the "video call" when fumbling with his phone on a regular call, which I myself have done several times. When he hacks into Facebook, it's actual Facebook, not some poorly mocked up variation, and Sheehan uses Photoshop to boost the contrast and invert the colors of a picture, letting him see an address on a checkbook (as opposed to the usual "enhance!" bullshit where someone gets a perfectly clear image of something that was probably like 10 pixels wide on the original). Tennant also has a "smart house", and while some of it is ludicrous (why would a table fan have bluetooth tech?), I can attest to how slow a Ring type device can be to show you a live image when you request it - the one I got after a few packages disappear often shows me a frame or two of the mailman walking away, too slow to record them actually walking up to my door and leaving the package. For some reason they didn't want to trust Google Maps, however - after Sheehan gets that address, and he's unsure of where the town is, he doesn't just click over on the very computer he's using to see where it is/how far a drive it will be - he moves over to the giant map of Oregon that his 14-ish brother has on his wall and finds it that way. Maybe that's why Devlin made so many alien movies - perhaps he is one, and is just unaware of how human beings actually act? It'd certainly explain the scene where an entire classroom seemingly has their notifications turned on for Sheehan's wall posts even though it's established he doesn't even go to the school.

Oh well. It's not the first time I've seen an interesting concept botched (hell, Boyce has been previously guilty of it - he wrote the thrill-free thriller Wicker Park), and I'm sure it won't be the last. Maybe someday someone will edit a third of the movie out and let it stand as an amusing diversion for Tennant's fans (I should note I never watched Doctor Who and the only thing I know him from is the Fright Night remake, which was even worse than this), but until then I wouldn't even recommend it as the VOD rental it should have been in the first place. In retrospect I should have moved seats to sit with that older lady; maybe we could have MST3k'd it and salvaged the two hours.

What say you?

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The Endless (2017)

MAY 2, 2018

GENRE: CULT
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

If you read my book (hint hint) you'll recall that the first movie in each chapter is representative of that month's particular sub-genre; the idea being that if you were to just watch those twelve movies (having not heard of them before, or at least never inclined to watch) you'd hopefully agree the book would have been worth your time/money. Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson's Resolution got that "coveted" slot for its month (October, which was "horror-adjacent" films), and I was just as big of a fan of their followup, Spring, so it's fair to say I was quite excited for their newest film, The Endless, which has been playing in limited release for a couple weeks now. Alas I only just now found time to go see it, at the non-ideal time of 10pm on a weeknight, i.e. practically a guarantee I'd fall asleep especially considering its 110+ minute runtime - but I stayed awake!

I mean I could just end the review right there; longtime readers shouldn't need to be sold any further on the film's merits ("If Collins stayed awake, this must be worth checking out!"), but for you new readers I guess I'll do my due diligence and get into things like "plot" and "characters". Ya jerks.

I didn't know much about the film beforehand, only that it had something to do with a cult and that it featured Benson and Moorhead in the lead roles, playing their cult characters from Resolution (if you haven't seen that one, I assure you it's not 100% essential, though it will give you a little more context and appreciation for at least one development later in this film). We only met them briefly in Resolution, giving a low-key pitch for their cult to that film's hero Mike, but when we pick up with them here they've left the cult and are trying to adjust to a normal life in Los Angeles, working as housekeepers and trying to keep the bills paid. When Aaron (they use their real first names, though they play brothers, hopefully keeping the idea that they're "playing themselves" at bay) receives a tape in the mail from one of his old "commune" friends, he goads Justin to paying them a visit and see how they're doing.

One might find this a rather ludicrous idea, but it actually works. The hook is that Justin was the one who really wanted to leave and kind of dragged his brother away from a life that almost kind of suited him, and since their outside life is shit there isn't much of an argument he can make for it besides "out here things might get better". Justin finally agrees to go more or less hoping Aaron, now older, will see it for the joke that it is (or that it's just too weird) and finally let go of it so he can blossom in the real world, but obviously things don't go as planned. Aaron starts getting easily swayed back into the fold (having Callie Hernandez instigating things probably doesn't hurt; I'd follow her into a cult sight unseen, let alone one I already had a connection to) while Justin becomes increasingly aware that things there can't be easily explained away by "they're crazy/brainwashed".

I won't say much more about what happens, only that it's very much in line with the unique brand of unsettling but also occasionally funny sort of things that peppered Resolution (so, if you hated that movie, I'd steer clear of this one, but know that I pity you). Again, seeing the earlier film isn't a necessity, but since Aaron and Justin were clearly in the same area as that film's Mike and Chris, it's a foregone conclusion that they'd be plagued by some of the same phenomena, some of which sheds light on the other film's mysteries. Not everything is explained (from either film), but again it doesn't matter - the real drive of the film is seeing these two guys work through their issues with each other and hopefully come out of the situation OK. The two filmmakers have been working together for almost a decade (more? I'm just going off IMDb's historical record) and their brotherly bond comes across throughout the film, and so it's easy to not worry too much about how the tape got sent to them or what that one weird thing we saw was and focus more on their current dilemma, hoping they can escape together or at least find their peace if they do end up going their separate ways. Unlike Resolution, the other characters we meet get fleshed out a bit, becoming people that could be in their own spinoff film (the Resolution Cinematic Universe?). In that film everyone that wasn't Mike or Chris only really appeared once, if memory serves, but here we get to know a few of the cult members and learn a little bit about their deal. I was particularly intrigued with Hal (Tate Ellington), the leader of the group who is patient with Justin's eye-rolling and, at times, almost seems a bit jealous of his ability to walk away from it all. I don't know if it was intentional or just me reading into it, but I kept getting the impression he was about five seconds from asking Justin if he could hitch a ride with them when they left, only to refrain out of some kind of guilt (for the other people) or fear, akin to convicts fearing their parole. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that they aren't just weirdos in the woods and that there is something definitely supernatural/otherworldly going on, and that also adds another layer to it - it's not that he's afraid he's wrong, it's that he's afraid because he knows he's right.

It helps that there's nothing outwardly evil about the cult. Justin says they castrate members, but this turns out to be a lie he told just to get Aaron to leave with him. They're not branded (so it's better than the one Chloe from Smallville ran!) or anything like that - they just live out in the woods, making beer, and have a few unusual rituals. Ultimately it's not really ABOUT the cult, but I think it really works in the film's favor that an audience member watching could kind of see the appeal (whereas if you're watching, say, The Sacrament, and thinking it's a good deal - seek help). My position on all religions - even Scientology to a degree - is that as long as you're not harming anyone, you should always go with the one that gives you the peace you seek, and who cares if it may look/sound weird to an "outsider"? By refraining from any kind of "drink the Kool-aid" kind of insanity, there's no real reason to look down on Aaron for wanting to stay behind; we only fear for his wellbeing due to the strange things that are in the area, independent of the group.

Speaking of fear, overall this is even less of a traditional horror film than their others; if not for the "sequel" status for a previously reviewed film I probably wouldn't count it as one at all, really. It's got a couple of jolts and some undeniably creepy moments (the guy in the tent, gah!), but when compared to cult-based horror like Race with the Devil or Starry Eyes it's closer to drama territory. Perhaps that's due to the fact it's twenty minutes longer than its predecessor but has about the same number of incidents, so they're just more spread out? It's not a mark against the film at all - I gave it 4 stars on Letterboxd, if that helps - but if you thought Resolution had no business in the horror section and were "let down" because of it, then it's probably best to skip this one.

Everyone else, enjoy! It's doing really well in limited release, so hopefully it'll lead to something bigger for the pair next time out. There are a couple instances in the film where the small budget was taking a toll on its visuals; nothing that should lessen your enjoyment or anything (I've seen worse in movies that cost literally 100x as much), but it got me wondering what they might do with a bigger budget - just not one that was so big they'd have to lose their voice in the process. Maybe a Blumhouse "Tilt" joint or something along those lines? But even if they shoot movies on their phone in their own homes I'm sure they will be interesting and worth checking out - they're three for three in my book, which is kind of extraordinary nowadays as I've seen so many filmmakers (particularly filmmaking teams) impress with their first film and never measure up again (cough, Bustillo/Maury, cough). Good job, gents.

What say you?

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