Final Recovery (2025)

Producer Joe Williamson reached out to see if I would review Harley Wallen's newest film, but unfortunately I fell behind on screener requests and am only just getting to this now. I was excited to check this out though, because I really enjoyed Wallen's last couple films. Let's see how this one did.

Final Recovery is about a treatment center run by a woman named Nanny Lou (Charlene Tilton), who, on the surface seems like she really cares for her patients, but there's something nefarious underneath all that. It looks like she's running a racket where she has crooked cops bring in people struggling with addiction so she can bilk the state for their care, and keep them pumped full of drugs so they never recover. And should her patients get wise to what she's up to, she's got a bone saw in a back room that she can use to make sure they disappear. One of these patients, Rodney (Jasper Cole), has been stuck in this cycle for years, but when a new patient, Dustin (Damien Chinappi) comes in, Rodney thinks he may have someone who can help him bring Nanny Lou to justice. The problem is, Nanny Lou has been at this for a long time, and will be hard to stop.

This is another from Wallen that really worked for me. Like the previous two we've reviewed, Beneath Us All and Ash and Bone, he does a great job of mixing genre film with his themes of how society values some people over others, and that's especially true about people struggling with addiction. One area where this one doesn't work as well as those other two though, is I wasn't sure whose story was supposed to be the focus, Rodney's, Dustin's, or Nanny Lou's. Even Dustin's sister Cindy (Kaiti Wallen) felt like she could've been the focus from how she's introduced to us, where she's questioning to Nanny Lou on whether her brother should even be in the facility, I thought the story may have been moving in the direction of following her advocating for her brother and trying to get help for him through official channels on the outside, but it never goes there after that initial conversation with Nanny Lou. The other thing was the fact that the film was set in Flint, MI, and I felt like they could've done more to make that a bigger part of the story. When I look at what worked though, it starts with Tilton, who was absolutely chilling. Even without the genre film elements, had this just been a Behind the Bastards-style biopic about someone using people struggling with addiction to bilk the state and insurance companies, she still would've been scary. I also liked how Cole and Chinappi gave us grounded, human characters who were struggling with addiction. I think without those performances, Tilton's alone would've given us a fun horror film, but Wallen's message wouldn't have come through, and that message gives the film a little bit more. Overall, I really enjoyed this, and with it available on Tubi, you should definitely check it out.

We're now at five of Wallen's directed films here on the site (he has an additional tag as an actor in Realm of Shadows), which puts him up there among the most for an indie director. The thing about his work that resonates with me is that theme that runs through all his work I've seen so far, not simply that there are haves and have-nots, but even harsher, that society deems some lives worth more than others, and the way he marries genre film with giving a voice to people whom society deems less worthy is something I really appreciate, and something I think he nails here in exploring the way society deals with, as opposed to helps, people battling addiction, while still maintaining the film's horror genre credentials. What people battling addiction have to go through to get help is probably a real life horror film in and of itself, but will people watch that as much as they'd watch a horror film about a scary woman in tacky Christmas sweaters dismembering people in a back room? Probably not, but with Wallen we get the message wrapped in a fun horror movie, and he does both effectively.

That scary woman in tacky Christmas sweaters is played by none other than Charlene Tilton. We've actually seen her here before in the Jeff Wincott PM flick Deadly Bet, but I imagine most Americans my age know her from our moms watching Dallas on a Friday night. When an indie director like Wallen finds out they can get a name like Tilton, they're hoping for a great performance beyond the help that their name on the tin means for sales and streams, but what Tilton gives us is another level. I don't know how anyone who did a scene with her was able to interact with her offset afterwards, I think I'd be too afraid to. What her performance does is turns the entire facility into a kind of haunted house, like an old Vincent Price movie, her ominous presence looms over everything. In that way, it was smart that Wallen included the element of Rodney and Dustin leaving the facility to work in Cindy's store, because we as an audience needed a break from the tension in Tilton's performance too.

As I mentioned above, this took place in Flint, MI, and was filmed on location there as well. It's a city that's been through a lot, as far back as 1989 Michael Moore made his famous documentary Roger and Me about GM closing a plant there, which left 35,000 people out of work. Since then, things have only gotten worse, leading up to the Republican government in Michigan's takeover of the city, who, in an attempt to cut costs, changed the city's water supply over to a contaminated river, making many residents sick and leaving them without clean drinking water for years. Going back even further in American history though, Flint was one of the birthplaces of what would become the middle class in this country, union workers receiving a wage that allowed them to live a dignified existence, something that spread throughout the US in the middle of the 20th century, only to be slowly dismantled in the 80s and 90s, and forgotten in the 21st century. And I think this is where, for me, if I hear a film is set in Flint, I want a little more of that history and legacy embedded in the story, and made me wish we had a little more of that here.

Finally, we have the question of whether or not this is a Christmas movie. You know me, I'm more open to having as many films under that banner as possible, but what's unique here is Wallen uses the fun and kitsch of Christmas as a juxtaposition to the horrors happening around everyone. We have Christmas songs, Christmas decorations, and Nanny Lou's tacky sweaters, while Nanny Lou is having someone dismembered, or someone else is dying of an overdose. It's a use of Christmas that I'm not sure I've seen before, because Christmas doesn't really play a part in the film, like no one's exchanging gifts or having a Christmas party. Another aspect of Christmas is the way we use it as a society to bring family members from far away together to celebrate in order to reaffirm familial bonds. For many people struggling with addiction, they've been estranged from family members, which means Christmas can lead to more feelings of isolation, which could beget more using. Unless I missed it, that never really comes into play here, like we don't hear Cindy making plans for her and Dustin, or Rodney's ex-wife making plans for her and their daughter without him, or even just what that would feel like to be in a facility like that for the holidays. Maybe something to explore in a "Final Recovery 2".

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi or Plex, which I think makes it a fun choice for your Christmas in July film. This is another solid outing from Wallen and company, I can't wait to see what's next!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33727216

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Realm of Shadows (2024)

This is another film producer Joe Williamson asked us to review, a horror anthology from writer/director/actor Jimmy Drain, featuring names like Mel Novak, Tony Todd, Vernon Wells, Richard Tyson, and Harley Wallen, a director we usually see when Joe sends us a screener, but here appears in a cameo at the end. Let's see how this one did.

Realm of Shadows is less an anthology and more a collection of short films made my Jimmy Drain, many of which feature him as the male lead. They deal with issues like witches who are feminists (haven't seen that trope before!), women who get impregnated by warlocks (sans Mia farrow and John Cassavetes), and spells to make women have sex with guys (a little on the rape-y side post-Cosby). Around these short films we have a group of witches trying to get a dagger, and using a Ouija board to get it. Suddenly at the end, Tony Todd shows up, Vernon Wells reveals himself to be leading the witches, and Harley Wallen and Richard Tyson look like witch hunters ready to take down the dagger witches. And then the movie ends.

And that's the movie. The most interesting and most exciting stuff all comes at the end. I can't knock it though, if I were Jimmy Drain, it sounds like a great idea: package all my short films, then get some big names to do some small scenes around them, and voila you're swimming in Tubi streams. I think the problem I had with this compared to other anthologies Joe has had us look at, is those ones were collections of short films all with similar themes, and all done by different directors, so we get unique voices and performances, which is something we needed here. The other thing is I think some of the stories had issues. Again, we probably never should've done the "spell cast to make a girl like you" paradigm, because it always had overtones of foregoing consent, but post-Cosby it should be totally off the table--though to be fair to Mr. Drain, the cellphone his character has looks like something out of 2008, so maybe he made it pre-Cosby? Also, the loaded trope of the feminists who are really just man-hating witches is also both dated and probably never should've been a thing to begin with. There were a couple shorts that were done more like silent films--perhaps because the audio was bad when they recorded them?--and while I liked that idea, we needed some inter-titles to know what was going on. I'm all for people making it happen in a creative field, and Jimmy Drain's short films here are no different; but I think overall, I just could've used a bit more from the stories, and more of the great stuff at the end.

My number one performance was Tony Todd, who I love anyway. This is now 7 films for him on the site, perhaps the most memorable being his turn as a baddie in Sabotage, but even here, he's just another level in the few scenes he's in. We have two names that are hitting their 12th film on the site, Mel Novak and Vernon Wells. Novak of course is a mainstay in the films Joe asks us to review, and he's always a lot of fun, playing a priest in the bumpers between shorts, who's then later revealed to be buddies with Tony Todd. That's the movie I need, those two as priests vanquishing evil. And perhaps that evil could be in the form of baddie Vernon Wells, who in this just appears at the end when he's revealed to be the one directing the witches coven seeking the dagger. It's always great to see these guys in movies, and despite having scant roles here, it was no less great to see them.

Often when I'm reviewing a movie, I pick my favorite supporting character, and here I had a clear winner. Look at how great that guy above is. He's either a priest, or he's selling beers in the stands at a baseball game, or he's a transient short order cook who may or may not have a rap sheet and who may or may not occasionally sleep out of his Chevy Ranger as he's traveling the country, starting over in a new city after he's worn out his welcome in the last one. As a priest he's telling Jimmy Drain--who I guess in this short is a college professor, or a grad student teaching English classes?--not to succumb to temptation when one of his students wants to hook up with him. What Drain apparently cuts out is our priest asking Drain after for $20 to float him through to payday. I don't know who he is, because his picture isn't on IMDb, and with these being shorts, characters were in and out so fast it was hard to know who anyone was--and I have a hunch the no image on IMDb is by design, the last thing he needs is the landlord in Des Moines that he skipped out on finding out where he is, or that guy in Poughkeepsie that he owes $500 to. Either way, here's to you this guy, you were fantastic.

Jimmy! Jimm-May! I love that the creative force behind these films isn't James Drain or Jim Drain, but Jimmy Drain. "Who do you put your bets in with?" "Jimmy the Drain over on 2nd and Wolf. They call him 'the Drain' because all your money goes down the drain with him!" Being of part-Irish decent, I've had family members call me "Matty" before, the same way my late grandfather was a "Jimmy," so not only I can appreciate it, I like that he's embracing it. I can also appreciate that he had all these short films, and he wanted to package them into something that can make him money. The problem was, the best stuff came with his bumpers and the final denouement, which I think made the shorts look worse by comparison. I hope he makes that second movie that the end of this one teases, because I think it could be really good. While I appreciate why he packaged all his shorts into this film, I'm rooting for him to make it happen with more full-length features.

Finally, look at that phone. I think I last had one like that in 2012. After that I got my brother's iPhone 4, and have been using iPhones ever since, going from that to my wife's i6, which I broke, forcing me to get the SE I have now. My dad has never been up on technology, but he finally had to get a flip phone when my mom got rid of their landline. He was saying how he never uses it, and I tried to explain to him how much I use mine for. The obvious one is texting, but it's not just phone texting, but messaging on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X. I use Apple Pay to make almost all of my purchases, plus I can ride the subway or the bus here in Philadelphia with Apple Pay, along with the subways/buses in New York, Boston, and Chicago. That means in those cities, I don't need to bother with getting a subway pass or ticket. My train tickets and plane tickets are on my phone, along with any sporting events I attend. If I'm lost, I can open my phone and find out where I am so I don't need to ask strangers for help. There's also the bad, like how I have all my work apps on my phone too, so I can see off hours when someone is pinging me--but even that can also be a good thing, because I can step away from the computer during work hours and still be available if someone needs me for something. Seeing that old phone made me a bit nostalgic, and there was maybe a romantic sense hearkening back to a simpler time, but how much better was that simpler time? Needing to get tokens or have a unique card for every city I went to to ride their subway? Making sure I had my plane ticket and boarding pass, and didn't lose them? I remember my friend forgetting our tickets to Gwar and realizing it when we were three hours from our dorm at UMaine. He had to buy us all new tickets when we got to the show in Worcester. Now he'd have the tickets on his phone--unless he still has a phone like that one.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States. While it has some moments, the thing I really want to see is the next movie that's teased at the end. By the same token, I'm always a proponent of supporting indie filmmakers, and you can support Jimmy Drain by just streaming this. It's a nice use of 90 minutes of your time, and you may find yourself enjoying some of the stories.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10619392

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Beneath Us All (2023)

This was a screener submission that producer Joe Williamson sent over. It's the newest film from Harley Wallen, and considering how much I enjoyed Ash and Bone, he was excited for me to give it a look. Unfortunately it got lost in the shuffle between between work and other things I had going on, but as we close out the year, I'm finally able to make it happen. Let's see how it did.

Beneath Us All stars Angelina Danielle Cama (from other Harley Wallen flicks Eternal Code, Abstruse, and the aforementioned Ash and Bone) as Julie, a young lady living in foster care in Maine who's about to age out of the system. Social worker Rebecca (Kaiti Wallen, also from the previous three Wallen films I mentioned) suspects something's up with her foster parents (Sean Whalen and Maria Olsen) and the way they care for Julie and her foster siblings, so she decides to keep a closer eye on her, which is fortuitous, because Julie finds a pendant in the woods, which unearths a long-buried Viking vampire, whom Julie nurses back to health, not knowing his sinister intentions. Will Rebecca be able to save Julie from this situation and get her the life she deserves after foster care?

First and foremost, we need to get the spoiler alerts out there. I can't discuss what I liked and didn't like without giving things away, so if you want to watch this, and I suggest you do, hop over to Freevee and check it out. You've been sufficiently warned. 

This is a little dark for my taste. We have a bird getting smashed to death, a cat killed, and two elementary-aged girls killed. That doesn't mean I think it's a bad movie, or that I think it was a bad move for Wallen and screenwriter Bret Miller to go in that direction, it's more a personal taste thing. Going strictly objectively, Wallen and cinematographer Alex Gasparetto do a great job shooting this, I loved the way the scenes were framed, and how they filmed the dark scenes without sacrificing visibility. I also like Wallen going back to his theme of "some lives are worth more than others" which we've seen in his other films, and Angelina Danielle Cama is great in the central role as the young lady who just wants to be a human and has a desire to help others, while her foster father Sean Whalen sees her as a means to cover his gambling debts through the checks he gets from the state for being her foster parent; and Kaiti Wallen sees getting Julie a better life as more her own raison d'etre as she's dealing with burnout from her job. One issue the film runs into is we lose Julie's story towards the end, as we focus more on Kaiti Wallen's Rebecca and her working with local sheriff Harley Wallen to find out what's happening in Julie's foster home. Because it felt like the ancient vampire was a metaphor for say a pimp or other predator that would prey on a young lady in Julie's situation, I would have liked to have seen more of that interplay; or if we wanted more about Rebecca's challenges as a social worker, maybe introduced that more early on so it felt like we were following two stories instead of one. Overall though, I feel like Wallen and everyone else involved here achieved what they were going for, and if you're okay with it being darker, this is a solid film that's worth your time.

We now have four films directed by Harley Wallen on the site, so it was definitely time to get him his tag, but beyond that, I think you can see a progression where he's getting a better sense of how he wants to make a movie and how he can creatively work around the budgetary and logistical constraints that come with being an indie filmmaker. I preferred Ash and Bone to this one, but I think this was objectively a better movie. What's great was he cast Angelina Danielle Cama in Ash and Bone to be a spoiled rich kid whose penchant for selfish troublemaking almost gets her father and stepmother killed, and does get some innocent locals killed; but then he could cast her here as someone on the opposite end of the spectrum, a child of the foster care system who has endured a lot--more than we probably know--but still cares enough for others to want to protect and nurture them. I was a really big fan of Cama's performance here, she exuded a young Scarlett Johansson presence in the way she delivered her lines and interacted with her other cast mates. It'll be interesting to see what she does next, I see in the upcoming projects section of Wallen's IMDb page that he has a sequel to Ash and Bone on the horizon, which sounds really good. 

After John Wick, if anyone didn't already know the rules surrounding killing animals in movies, they should now. I remember screenwriter Johnny Sullivan (Recoil--the Steve Austin one) said screenwriters know killing an animal is a huge deal in a film, not something to be done without understanding the gravity of it, and he used Wick as an example, having gotten wind of it before it was released. In this we first get a tiny bird that Whalen smashes to death with a shovel, saying he was putting it out of its misery, even though it seemed like it was tweeting along just fine. Then that poor kitty above gets fed to our vampire baddie. While we don't see it happen, we know it's happened, and knowing how adorable she is in the previous scene, it's hard to take. Finally, Julie's two younger foster sisters are killed by the vampire, which we also don't see. Again, it was all too dark for me, but I also know I'm more sensitive to that kind of thing. I think of Do or Die, where the cat eats the poisoned fish before our heroes do, tipping them off that something was amiss. Like this film, they give the kitty a credit, so we think "hey, she's all right, she was just playing her part." Maybe, but if we're all just playing a part, then should I not be moved by Cama's performance as Julie, since she's just playing a part too? Another famous example is Elves, which the case could be made is so ridiculous, the cat murder is just part of the ridiculousness. For me it's one thing that keeps it from being my all time favorite Christmas film, but I get too how Mitch from the Video Vacuum can look past it. Finally, on our most recent "Middle Aged Men Watch 90s Era Jim Belushi," Jon Cross from After Movie Diner and I watched Mr. Destiny, which has Belushi run over his dog while he was in the what if portion of the story, only to find out his dog was okay when he went back to his normal life. I was more okay with it, feeling like the dog never really died, but Jon made the point that in that alternate timeline the dog did die, which I had to agree with as being an issue, so even there, killing the dog was too much. I also think a one-off would've been more manageable, but killing a tiny bird, then a small cat, then two elementary-aged kids--one of whom runs into the woods because she thinks she hears her missing kitty, only to be killed--is too much darkness in one film for me to take.

Probably the most recognizable name in this for people who haven't seen many Harvey Wallen films is Sean Whalen, who plays the creepy and abusive foster dad. He turns in a really great performance here, but for me the issue was the scenes of him losing at poker took away from what we had going on between Julie's struggle as a foster child and Rebecca's struggle as a social worker. I think that was where the meat of the movie was, not Whalen's character, but I also get that having a Whalen in the film, you want to use him more. I would offer a counterpoint: his performance was strong enough here that he gives us what we need in fewer scenes. Or maybe another possibility if we needed more of him, was to give him more scenes with Cama and Kaiti Wallen, so we don't lose their story as much, but we also get the requisite Whalen screentime. The one thing I wouldn't want is the film to be longer to mitigate these issues. 90 minutes is right where this should be.

Finally, this takes place in Maine, even though it was shot in Michigan. They use the fictitious county of Oakland, which is a town in Maine, near Waterville, but isn't a county--unlike in Michigan where it's not only a country, but one of the biggest counties as part of the Detroit metro area. I get wanting to use a fictitious county, as I use fictitious towns and even states in my writing, though I don't know if they had used Kennebec County, the county Oakland is in in Maine, if anyone would've come complaining if they thought the story hit too close to home. (The other thing is, if the story is taking place in Maine, you can't use the generic "the county" to describe anything, because that's the nickname for the largest county by area, Aroostook County.) Anyway, all that to say, one thing I enjoy about Wallen's films is his use of Michigan as a character, and we lost that by setting the film in a fictitious version of Maine. It's not like there's something specifically Maine about the film either, just that you can't use ancient Vikings dropping things off in Michigan. Worse though, it felt like a Michigan version of Maine, especially with people's accents, kind of like that SNL sketch that was supposed to be a courtroom drama in Maine, but everyone had Louisiana accents. I'm not saying Wallen should never make a film that takes place anywhere outside of Michigan, I'm just saying his use of Michigan as a character was a strong point for me in his other films, and the fact that it came through even for someone like me who has never stepped foot in Michigan except for one time switching planes at Detroit Metro Airport, shows how powerful an element it is, and it's something that's lost when the film takes place somewhere else.

All right, with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this free with ads on Freevee here in the States. Depending on how dark you like to go in your films, this might work for you. It's a solidly made film, well-shot and well-acted, so if you're okay with how dark it is, this is worth your time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11027288

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Ash and Bone (2022)

For February's indie review, producer Joe Williamson came to me to see if I'd review this film for the site, and though it didn't look like the kind of film I usually do for the DTVC, I figured I'd give it a shot to help get the word out on another independent film. It was directed by Harley Wallen, whose work we last looked at when we did Abstruse with Tom Sizemore back in 2020, so we were probably overdue to review another one of his too.

Ash and Bone stars Angelina Danielle Cama as Cassie, a troubled teen whose father (Wallen) and his girlfriend (Kaiti Wallen) take her to a cabin his family has in rural Michigan to get her away from the trouble she's in. The problem is, Cassie has a way of finding trouble wherever she goes, and this time she meets a young couple at a local bar and convinces them to break into a scary farm house owned by a scary brother and sister who may or may not be kidnapping and torturing young women at their place. Spoiler alert: they are, and when they get home they find Cassie and her new friends there. They escape, but the brother and sister won't let this go so easily. Like Q bringing the Enterprise in contact with the Borg, Cassie has set in motion a season finale cliff hanger of epic proportions.

Out of the three films of Wallen's we've covered here now, this one works the best for me. Yes, the end meandered a bit, but considering his films usually clock in at 100+ minutes at a minimum, and sometimes close in on two hours, this one at 97 minutes had a leaner feel that really worked in its favor. From there, Wallen with his cinematographer Alex Gasparetto do a great job framing scenes and individual shots--something that I thought he could've leaned on more in Abstruse he really does a great job of here. We also get great performances, a few standouts for me included Cama as Cassie, Wallen as the naive, affluent city-dweller dad, Erika Hoveland as the sister of the serial killer siblings, and then Jamie Bernadette as the local cigarette smoking young woman who seems like she's already been beaten down by this isolated small town. Finally, I'll need to get into some spoilers, so be warned if you read further that I'll be giving away the film, but getting into Bret Miller's story, I liked the way we're given Cassie as a sympathetic figure to start, but as it goes on, we see that she's the cause of a lot of destruction in the lives of the people she comes into contact with. Without that, this feels like a two-part episode of a CBS procedural like Criminal Minds, which wouldn't have been horrible, but I liked the ambiguity Cassie's role gave us. Also, the fact that most of the victims are in some way complicit in their own demise: Cassie's friend Tina (Calhoun Koenig) doesn't need to jump in the stolen police car with Cassie, but she does; her dad didn't want to believe his daughter was the bad influence, but if he had, they wouldn't have gone to that remote Michigan town; and the young couple could have told Cassie no when she said she wanted to break into the scary farm house. They all let Cassie manipulate them, with disastrous results. It took what I thought was going to be a scary slasher film and made it something more.

Harley Wallen definitely embodies the independent spirit of movie making, which I really appreciate, and which really comes through in this. I think the big difference between his films and some of the other indie films we look at is length. Motern Media's films usually clock in around 88 minutes. Shogun's around 90. Cinema Epoch/Cineridge's even shorter, with ones in the 75-minute range. When I see a Wallen film on Tubi and it's 105-minutes to potentially closing in on 120, it's a bigger investment--like Abstruse, which was 117 minutes. Part of the reason why I think his films tend to go longer though, is he has a message in them he wants to deliver, and he doesn't want to lose any part of that message. I get that, and I respect it, but where I think this movie worked better for me, was the messages here were more under the surface for me to take with me after I've thought about it more. One big one that he used in both Abstruse and Eternal Code, is the idea that in our society some lives are worth more than others, but in those films it was more the main driver of those stories, while here it was underneath the surface of a tense horror thriller. It's like you get this relief that Wallen's character and his family survive, but what about all the poor girls that didn't? Or that the thing that caused the serial killing siblings' downfall was that they attacked some rich people from the city, but then you as the viewer have to juxtapose that on your own with the idea that they were okay killing girls who were runaways, those girls probably escaping something horrible at home only to end up dying a horrible death. You don't get that in your usual slasher, so it was a welcome surprise to have that kind of depth.

We're now at 11 Mel Novak films on the site. Here he plays the owner of a local bar, and while the role is scant, it has that vibe of the impartial observer who doesn't get involved in the town's business, but he has a sense of what's going on. I think for what this role was, it enhanced the film enough, gave it that little extra that an indie flick like this would want by having him in this part. We actually haven't seen him since 2020's review of An Hour to Kill, another one that producer Joe Williamson asked us to cover. In looking at Novak's IMDb bio, while probably more of his newer stuff will probably only come to us through further review requests, he also has some stuff from the 90s and early 2000s that we haven't hit yet either, so this isn't the last we've seen of him here. He kind of fits that Charles Napier/Richard Lynch category, where we don't necessarily seek his films out, but he stars with enough people that we do seek out, that we end up seeing him enough on here--and to further the comp, Lynch has 13 tags, and Napes 12, so Novak's 11 is right in line with them.

Another twist for me was how, what starts out as your usual "who wants to see some pretty women get killed in horrible ways" kind of film, turns into almost a female empowerment movie. The male characters reveal themselves to be the weaker ones, whether it's Tucker (Mason Heidger), the boy in the young couple Cassie befriends, who gives up his girlfriend's (Bernadette) location, and then gives up Cassie's location to our baddies; or Wallen, who both can't decide whether he wants to let his daughter tell him what to do, or his new girlfriend, but even when he has a gun, it's his daughter Cassie who uses it to save them; or the brother (Jimmy Doom) in the brother-sister serial killer duo, who at first seems to be telling his sister, Hoveland, what to do, but really it's her that's pulling the strings; and then finally it's Cassie who saves her family. This isn't just some kind of Final Girl construct Wallen's leaning on, even though this film easily could've gone in that direction, the male characters are consistently weaker than their female counterparts. Even in the opening scene, where we see the young lady trying to escape the serial killers, I didn't think anything of it at the time, but it's the sister who catches her by shooting the victim first, so the brother can finish her off. The thing that keeps it from fully being a female empowerment movie is the same thing that keeps the thread of "some lives are worth more than others:" the fact that so many unfortunate girls are killed by these baddies.

Finally, while the other two Wallen films we've looked at on here took place in Michigan too, they could've taken place anywhere. This one, on the other hand, uses Michigan in a way that really works. I've only ever been to Michigan the one time I had to switch plans at the Detroit airport, which doesn't really count, so it's not like I'm intimately familiar with it, but there's enough ground laid by the story and scenery in this movie that I didn't need to be for it to work for me. We see so many films made in Michigan now, but so few of them use Michigan as part of the story, which to me feels like a wasted opportunity, especially with the state's tragedies and triumphs being so well documented. The abandoned buildings in Detroit that provide the playground for a trouble-making teen like Cassie, the remnants of a city that was once the engine that drove the nation; but at the same time, Cassie is the child of an upper class that also has remnants, and those remnants still exist in a way that the rest of the state, especially the rural areas, both respect and resent it. It's another area where this movie gives us a little more. This easily could've existed in a fictitious setting, and probably would've worked out fine; but by using Michigan this way, it becomes another character, one that plays an important role in how the film unfolds.

And with that, I'll wrap this up. If, looking at the cover, you're coming to this for another film about pretty young women getting killed in gruesome ways, you'll be disappointed; but if you're coming for a suspense thriller that gives you more than that in the story and performances, I think you'll be happy with this. As of right now it's available on Prime and Tubi, so I'd give it a shot on one of those.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10015244

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Abstruse (2019)

After reviewing Eternal Code, one of the film's producers, Joe Williamson, asked me if I could do another one of writer/director/actor Harley Wallen's films, and I was all for it. Seeing Tom Sizemore's name on the tin, and being a big Saved by the Bell fan and wanting to get Dennis Haskins on the site, really sold it; plus, it's always good to get the word out on another indie project. On the other hand, when I jumped into the screener, I saw that the runtime was 1 hour 56 minutes. Gasp!

Abstruse follows Kaiti Wallen as Amanda, a bartender whose coworker is killed by a local rich kid and senator's son (Kris Reilly) during an erotic asphyxia moment gone wrong. The police don't believe her, and it looks like someone is covering up for the senator (Haskins). As luck would have it, Wallen's father, Sizemore, is getting out of prison, and he's happy to get his daughter out of this mess and bring this kid down. But the question is, is the rich kid so far gone that he brings himself down first? And how many other people with him?

Our number one rule at the DTVC is anything over 88 minutes is borrowed time. The thing is though, it's not just our rule, it's pretty consistent among bloggers in our community. I remember talking to Jacob Gustafson, who wrote Awful Awesome Action, Vol. 1, and he talked about being scared when he sees a 100-minute runtime. Ty from Comeuppance Reviews and I discuss how sweet a nice 80-minute flick is. Even taking a sample of the external reviews of this film, whether people loved it or killed it, the common complaint either way was the length.  Unfortunately this detracts from some really great stuff that I'll be discussing in the following paragraphs, like the performances or the great shots, because the story tends to get in the way of that. I don't agree with the people who killed this film, it's not a one-star or anything bad like that. It's an earnest independent project that had some really good points, and I'm going to make sure my review reflects my respect for that overall.

This begs the question, what would I have cut or how would I have done it differently? For me, this had elements that reminded me of the early 90s erotic thrillers I'd catch on cable at that time. The killing of the friend in particular really brought me back to those. In that space, maybe the thing is Kaiti Wallen's character witnesses her friend's murder--or even just suspects it if the friend goes missing--then goes to the police, and by the time they get to the killer's apartment, he's cleaned it all up, and they don't believe her. Except for grizzled veteran detective, Tom Sizemore, his gut is telling him she's telling the truth. Maybe he has an estranged daughter that Wallen reminds him of. But the thing is, even with Sizemore's help, ultimately the job of investigating falls on Wallen. She's our hero, and we could lean on her great performance and Kris Reilly's as the killer to have this tense game of cat and mouse. What happens in the film that we have though, is instead Sizemore takes over for Wallen as the hero, and to some extent Haskins and the crooked cops try to take over for Reilly as the baddies. 90 minutes; taut, tense, sexual thriller; baddie who oozes death and menace in every scene, juxtaposed by a heroine we want to root for--this formula worked well for Shannon Tweed in 1994, and with Harley Wallen's direction and Michael Kettenbeil's cinematography, this could have even exceeded what those early 90s erotic thrillers were.

Look at that shot there. You wouldn't have known that that was preceded by a lot of back-and-forth of dialog between the two that we didn't need. The shot does it all. The thing is, like Eternal Code, Harley Wallen had a message he wanted to give, about how the rich and powerful can play with the lives of those less fortunate; but also that you have Haskins, the senator, who's a horrible father and essentially leads to his son being a sociopathic killer by how poorly he raised him, but society applauds him as a great man; versus Sizemore as the felon who's a great father and raises a great daughter in Kaiti Wallen's character, but society shames him. In Eternal Code, the message made sense about the rich and powerful--that some lives are worth more than others in our society--because that was literally the movie; but here it felt grafted on and weighed the film down for me. Sometimes a shot like this is all you need.

When Kris Reilly as the baddie captures Kaiti Wallen's other friend, played by Jesi Jensen, that interplay also reminded me a lot of those old 90s erotic thrillers on cable. It was a common device: maybe the hero/heroine thinks one guy is the killer, so they hone in on them, only to discover that it's this person they were close to all along and they realize that person is with the friend! Here it wasn't like that at all though, Reilly actually threatened Jensen's character earlier on, and while the tension of him having captured her is there, it's also diminished by all the other loose ends needing to be tied up. The usual way to pull this off in a 90-minute film is have her get captured around the 70-75-minute mark, and we're able to really focus on her danger plus the heroine's race against time; but here it happens around the 90 minute mark with another half-hour to go, and we have to deal with Reilly taking care of his father, his father's fixer, and the detectives. Again, if you look at that shot below, it's tense, scary stuff, but we as the audience just don't get the chance we need to lean into it with everything else going on.

As much as I liked Tom Sizemore in this, and as much as you could really tell how good he was as an actor compared to everyone else, I do feel like it's important to give credit to Kaiti Wallen and Kris Reilly. Had this been a smaller-scale film, I think the two of them combined with Wallen's direction and Kettenbeil's cinematography could have carried it. Kris Reilly was chilling as the killer, and Kaiti Wallen was lead that you could root for. The problem is, Wallen's character isn't established well to start, it's actually the friend who's murdered, Jessika Johnson, who gets established at the beginning instead; and then she gets diminished further by the way Sizemore almost takes over the hero role. And then I think Reilly also gets diminished, because we end up with too many baddies: Haskins as his father, Cody, his father's fixer, and the crooked cops, one of which was played by Harley Wallen. Despite the fact that the roles may have been diminished though, the performances weren't, and I think it will be cool to see if Wallen goes back to them in future films.

I think it's time to wrap this up. There were some real bright moments in this, but ultimately for me, that near two-hour runtime overshadows it. Looking at it from an independent production standpoint though, I would hate for people to miss out on Harley Wallen's direction, Michael Kettenbeil's work as director of photography, and the performances by Kris Reilly and Kaiti Wallen. I think it's just always a harder ask of people in a two-hour package. I want to thank Joe Williamson again for giving me the screener for this and having me check it out, as I always appreciate the opportunity to do that!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6271432

Eternal Code (2019)

After I reviewed Nemesis V, which starred DTVC favorite Mel Novak, one of the producers of this film, Joe Williamson, came to me to see if I'd review it for the site, because it also has Novak. While the Mel Novak part was important, I think even bigger was getting the word out on another indie flick, so that was why I jumped at the chance. Let's see how it did.

Eternal Code is about a medical science company that develops the technology to download someone's mind into another person's body. It's the key to eternal life, the only catch is, someone has to die in order for it to work. For one member of the board, the sinister Richard Tyson in a great turn as a baddie, he thinks this isn't such a bad deal; for another member of the board, played by Erika Hoveland, she has some issues with a company playing God, and is letting her conscience get in the way. That's when Tyson ramps up the pressure by having her and her husband kidnapped so she'll change her vote. The fly in the ointment of his plan: her daughter escapes, and finds a homeless vet in the park she knows--who has a certain set of skills. Will those skills be enough to take down Tyson?

I'm of split mind on this, because there are two things at play here. First, I really like the overarching message: while we say all life is precious and sacred, some lives are more important than others in our society, and this concept of the rich living forever at the expense of the poor is the logical conclusion of our for-profit healthcare system. This is both a metaphor for our current system, and a commentary, and I really appreciated that. On the other hand, the whole kidnapping intrigue aspect felt like it spiraled out of control a bit at the end. People were being moved around like the MacGuffin in a Marx Bros. comedy. To me it betrayed the message, and bogged the film down, especially considering the film is 105 minutes long, already breaking the 88-minute rule. But I have to applaud the depth of the message and what this was trying to say. It's not easy to pull that off in a film that has limited resources like this one. I just wish they had leaned on that message more and less on the kidnapping parts.

Richard Tyson is a major standout in this as the baddie. I'm going to talk a bit more about that later, but he was bad from the first scene--they didn't even need to tell us he was a baddie, he just exuded it so much. To that end, I think that's another area where the kidnapping didn't need to be as drawn out, because we didn't need it as much to establish him as bad, he was already establishing himself in every scene. We last saw him here in the Seagal flick The Perfect Weapon, but that part wasn't as big as what he had here. He found a role he could sink his teeth into, and went for it, which is always great to see.

The director and writer of this is Harley Wallen, who also stars as one of the kidnappers. I was trying to figure out why I thought he looked familiar, and I saw that he had an uncredited part in Superman V Batman: Dawn of Justice, so that's probably it. According to IMDb he's got a fair amount of films that he's written and directed like this--including three others that were released in 2019 alone! Again, this one didn't fully work for me, but there were things in it that I really liked, so I'll be interested to check out the others to see how they are too. It looks like they're all on Prime, which helps.

There are a lot of messages in this about how we perceive money and power in our society, and while this has the standard "don't judge a book by its cover" with our hero, played by Damien Chinappi, as a homeless vet whom the daughter befriends after she and her friend make him food, and then when she needs to turn to him after her parents are kidnapped, it turns out he has the training to save the day. Beyond that basic message, this goes a step further, as his look is transformed when he's cleaned up and put in a suit. That transformation is as much a part of the message in this film as anything. We see Chinappi's character one way when he has one look, and then the exact same person is perceived differently when his look changes, again getting to this idea that some people are worth more than others in our society based on the rubrics we use to judge them. To that end you may even say that the movie's message is already a metaphor for the Iraq war vet, in the sense that the rich already sacrifice the lives of the poor so they can live longer when they send them to war.

*****SPOILER ALERT*******SPOILER ALERT********SPOILER ALERT***********
I want to discuss the ending here, so if you don't want to know it first, skip to the bottom. As I mentioned above, Richard Tyson was a great baddie, and what do we always want to see happen to a great baddie? That he gets his comeuppance. And in this one, while Hoveland escapes and the baddies seem to be defeated, Tyson is able to get what he wants before that: to have his mind transferred into the body of a healthier person. Perhaps this was setting up for a sequel, but even if it was, I needed some kind of a period in this film first, which involved Tyson not getting away with it. Yes, we know in real life the rich and powerful usually do get away with it, but that's why we come to movies, so we can see them not get away with it.
*****SPOILER ALERT*******SPOILER ALERT********SPOILER ALERT***********

We now return you to your regularly scheduled review, as it's time to wrap this one up. I think the best thing to do is read my review and, knowing my tastes from the other reviews of mine I read, determine if what I said worked and didn't work for me would make it a go for you. Right now you can stream it on Prime, and we know that's always a good way to catch it, as you're only investing time after you spent on the subscription. And thank you again to Joe Williamson for having me look at this! I'm realizing now I forgot to mention Mel Novak, but he's not in it that much, so that's okay.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8655738